Rob: So you talk about the TCC and the TNS in terms of the global capitalism crisis, holocaust, you use pretty extreme language, you talk about extreme crisis you talk about holocaust. You're talking about the kind of stuff that Daesh, ISIS talks about. The end of the world.
WR: Okay, well let's see if I'm actually exaggerating, let me start, I mean you're familiar with my work. I've identified six dimensions in this global crisis is really, I think, justifies not the end of the world, the planet world will go on, but the end of human civilization as we know it and significant life on the planet. Just first of all, and again people are most aware of this, we're reaching the environmental scientists tell us that there's nine planetary boundaries beyond which we can't go without endangering, literally, life on planet earth. They call them tipping points, and three of those nine we've already passed the planetary boundaries. Climate change, nitrogen cycle, and diversity laws.
There's a real chance that life cannot be sustained over the next few decades on the planet earth. And some of your listeners might remember a very popular book, popular because it's so dramatic and so well documented, came out I believe earlier this year, if not in late 2014, titled The Sixth Mass Extinction. And the book pointed out, there have been five previous extinctions in our five billion some odd years on the five billion years that our planet has existed. And those were all created by natural disasters, a comet hit the earth, or a giant asteroid last time around and that made the dinosaurs go extinct, that was the fifth mass extinction. But now we're moving towards another sixth mass extinction. And this time it's created by human conduct, not by some natural changes that we have no control over.
And so to begin with we have to talk about an ecological holocaust which is underway, and which literally threatens life on this planet. But there's another dimension which leads to the dramatic language I use to climate change and ecological holocaust and that is that it is linked in turn to wars, it is linked in turn to social and political conflicts and crises and to things like what's going on in the Congo, or look at East Africa. If you study what's going on in East Africa, I'm talking about the region of everything from the Congo and that is genocide as well. Six million people dead in the Congo. Well there's structural reason to this, part of it is intense inequality, which I'll mention in a moment, but the other part is that as climate change really effects this region, it extends desertification, dries up water sources and so forth. People are struggling for ever less resources and that leads to social and political conflict, to violence, to militant movements, whether they're express and Islam or whether they're expressed as that Christian movement in Uganda, I'm sorry I'm forgetting the name, the world lords something in Uganda. All of this has its structural roots in global capitalism and also in global ecology so it's all connected.
One comment also, again this is not so much, I don't use the world holocaust to describe global inequalities but I want to point out that as long as we've had records we've never see such unbelievably intense global inequalities. Everyone's talking about this Piketty book, but Piketty barely scratches the surface. January of this year, Oxfam, which is a development NGO, released a report on global inequality which pointed out that the richest 1% of humanity will control, by the time we get to 2016, and that's barely a month away, 50% of the worlds wealth. That's 1% and 50% of the world's wealth. And just the top 80 billionaires and of course Bernie Sanders now has, and there's the occupy wall street movement has popularized the notion of the 1% and Bernie Sanders the billionaire class. But just the top 80 billionaires on the planet, when this report was released, controlled 50%, your mind can't even around it. And that top 80 billionaires increased their wealth from 2010 to 2014 by 50%, while the poorest half of humanity, that's 3.5 billion people, had a decreased in their wealth by 50%.
So we see a direct transfer, just from 2010 to 2014, of this unbelievable amount of wealth from 3.5 billion people to the 80 top billionaires. And below them, just to conclude this, the report points out that below them we have this global social Apartheid system where 20% of humanity below the 1% have the other 94% of the world's wealth. While 80% humanity, I'm talking about 5 Billion people, have only 5.5% of the worlds wealth. So we have 20% of humanity can, imagine surviving, using that wealth and those resources to face up to climate change and to acquire scarce resources as a result of ecological holocaust. While 80% of humanity will fight amongst itself, kill ourselves amongst ourselves if we don't get it together. And so again this is military conflict, political conflict, social violence. So it's all connected. And if you put this whole picture together of the global crisis and of course I haven't even commented on the basic economic dimensions of global crisis. Then you see that really we are talking about humanity faces, that why I titled my book, The Crisis of Humanity. We really, the stakes have never been higher. And again, just to conclude, I am not pessimistic, because there's also this mass revolt from below and we're moving in the right direction, I'm just worried that things are getting so grave that we are running out of time.
Rob: Yeah, I have to mention Paul Hawken, he wrote a book a number of years ago called Blessed Unrest and recently he says there are over a million organizations working towards social and ecological justice, so there is hope.
WR: Yes, absolutely. I mean the communities and all around the world people are densely organized. You know the phrase global civil society, I don't like it but we don't need to go into why I don't like that phrase. But if we were to use it, global civil society from below is unbelievably densely organized. I think to make global civil society more powerful we need specifically the connection consciousness you're talking about, the transnational consciousness I'm talking about. But also increase out transnational mechanisms of coordination, so they go together. Understanding the enemy we're facing is also linked with organizing in a way which links these million organizations to each other and all the numerous endless struggles that we have at every level.
Rob: Now there's a good word, transnational mechanisms of coordination. Not a word but-- I've theorized that we are transitioning towards a more bottom up culture, because of the catalyzation of the internet and digital and distributed technologies. How do you see them fitting in to this transnational mechanisms of coordination.
WR: Right of course, really good question and we're at the cutting edge of another struggle there. To see if transnational corporate capital will gain control over the internet and over that means of communication from below that we currently have. As limited as it may be. But absolutely. You know any time there's a new technology, everything has always has, is double edged swords or have, you know dialectic. It has different dimensions to it. So the introduction of the internet has allowed corporations of course to set up a lobby from INAUDIBLE 42:35 from China and Amazon and the United States and integrate the global economy, top down from, with control by the transnational capitalist class but it has also allowed horizontal communication from below all across the globe. Many people have spoken about that. We don't need to repeat that here so. You know the internet has, opens up all kinds, and has, opened up all kinds of possibilities for creating transnational communities from below and imagining a new world and communicating these across, you know horizontally from below. And coordinating, I mean the internet and this type of communication is a transnational mechanism of coordinating popular resistance and alternatives. Absolutely. But right now, and again I'm not, it's not my theory, this is everyone's already been speaking about this.
There's this incredible effort by the transnational capitalist class and the corporations to gain control over the internet. To completely commercialize, that is to commodify the internet. But also to make the internet something that, rather than allowing this communication, horizontal communication from below would be a one dimensional communication from above down to us in the same way that the mass media is currently. NBC, ABC, CNN so forth and so on. And so that's another front line of struggle, is struggle over communications and the global commons. Right now the internet is still the global commons despite its increasing commodification. And so there, that's absolutely, we need to defend that and we need to even deepen our use of the internet and there already is social media for what we're talking about.
Rob: So I'm very interested in what you just referred to how the top down, elite, transnational people, the transnational elite are attempting to ratchet down the tools that potentially give us bottom up power. Can you talk more about that?
WR: Right well we've already seen this, it was defeated, again I'm sorry I apologize to your listeners I have bad memories with specific names but there was a bill that was going to allow a bifurcated internet that just was defeated actually. Obama did not approve it, the reason he didn't approve it is because there was mass resistance of it from below. A part from the environmental movement, it's probably the most coordinated and mass you know upsurge in this regard in the past year, in 2015. So it was not approved but the bill was for, to create two levels of the internet, one was would high speed completely commodified, commercialized controlled by the same global corporation, AT&T and Verizon and so forth. Time Warner. In which you would have quick, speedy internet that you would pay for and that would largely be, again something when which we're fed, sort of converting that internet into mass media and then you would have slow, more difficult to access ways of entering into the internet from below which would sort of impede what we've been able to do with the internet so far.
Now that is a massive ongoing struggle. We had one victory, again I mentioned in which Obama did not approve, he vetoed that particular bill earlier this year. I don't remember the name of it but in countries all over the world, and this is also part of the TPP, the Trans Pacific Partnership. So called intellectual property rights and also turning services, including communications into completely commodified with no state restrictions and basically a free hand to corporate capital. So all over the world the struggle is continuing as the internet becomes the principle site of communications and of what we call more technically intersubjective development. Meaning we have a collect shared consciousness of something. It's a major, major battlefield.
Rob: Now you've written in your book about some of the problems you have with the way progressives and liberals think about change and can you talk about that?
WR: Yes. Many things but one of the things I was referring to, I'm not sure if this is what you're making reference to, is that we used to have a model of change which I have critiqued as Vanguardism in the 20th century. The idea was that we need, you set up a revolutionary political party, and then all the social movements and everyone supports that political party and subjects itself to what the political party says we need to do. And then that party struggles for state power, whether in a revolution against a dictatorship and take state power or whether by electoral means, whatever it is, comes to power and the political party will change society for the better from the top down according to this model of Vanguardism. And then in reaction to the bankruptcy of that model of Vanguardism, in the late 20th century and into the early 21st century an alternative model has emerged known as horizontalism. And sort of the models for that.
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