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humanrightsupdates · 4 years

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Israel/OPT: 10 things you need to know about “annexation”

1. Is a flagrant violation of international law

“Annexation” is acquiring territory by force and is a flagrant violation of international law. As such it can have no effect on the legal status of the territory, which remains de jure occupied. In the context of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), “annexation” means extending Israeli law to areas which are recognized as occupied and treating them as part of the territory of Israel.

2. Illustrates cynical disregard for international law

International law is crystal clear on this matter – annexation is unlawful. Israel’s continued pursuit of this policy further illustrates its cynical disregard for international law. Such policies do not change the legal status of the territory and its inhabitants under international law as occupied nor remove Israel’s responsibilities as the occupying power under international humanitarian law– rather it points to the to the longstanding need for the international community to put an end to impunity for violations of international law by Israel.

3. Exacerbates decades of human rights violations

Amnesty International is calling on the Israeli authorities to immediately abandon plans to further “annex” territory in the occupied West Bank because they will exacerbate decades of systematic human rights violations against Palestinians and aim to deprive Palestinians in the OPT of the protection of international humanitarian law.

Such a step by Israel would also violate the UN Charter, peremptory norms of international law (jus cogens), and obligations under international humanitarian law.

4. Entrenches institutionalized discrimination

Under domestic Israeli law, moves towards further “annexation” of Palestinian territory would mean a continuation of Israeli settlement expansion. It would also further entrench policies of institutionalized discrimination and mass human rights violations that Palestinians face in the OPT as a result of the occupation, including systematic denial of civil and political rights of Palestinians, as well as violations of other rights such as freedom of movement, equality and non-discrimination.

5. Amounts to ‘war crimes’

Israel’s policy of settling its civilians in occupied Palestinian territory and displacing the local Palestinian population continues to contravene fundamental rules of international humanitarian law. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states: “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” It also prohibits “individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory.”

Settlements are created with the sole purpose of permanently establishing Israeli civilians on occupied land; this is a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and “annexation” has no bearing on this legal determination.

Recently, dozens of UN experts have voiced concerns that the proposed annexation plan would create a “21st century apartheid”.

6. Must be rejected by the international community

Members of the international community must enforce international law and re-state that “annexation” of any part of the occupied West Bank is null and void. They must also work to immediately stop the construction or expansion of illegal Israeli settlements and related infrastructure in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. As a first step they should end all trade with Israeli settlements by banning settlement products and stopping companies domiciled in their territories from operating in or with settlements.

The international community should also reject the so-called “deal of the century”, and any other proposal seeking to undermine Palestinians’ human rights, including the right of return of Palestinian refugees. Amnesty supports the opening of an International Criminal Court Investigation into the situation in the OPT and calls on governments to offer their full political and practical support to the International Criminal Court (ICC) as it decides on its jurisdiction over the “situation in Palestine”.

7. Does not change Israel’s legal obligations as an occupying power

“Annexation” does not change the main two international legal regimes that apply to the OPT. The situation is primarily governed by both international humanitarian law (including the rules of the law of occupation) and international human rights law. International criminal law is also relevant as some serious violations may constitute war crimes or crimes against humanity. Annexation is unlawful under international law and is therefore “null and void and without international legal effect.”

It would not change the legal status of the territory under international law as occupied, nor remove Israel’s responsibilities as the occupying power. According to Article 47 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, “protected persons who are in occupied territory shall not be deprived of their rights as the result of the occupation nor by any agreement concluded between the authorities of the occupied territories and the Occupying Power, nor by any annexation by the Occupying Power of the whole or part of the occupied territory.”

8. Other serious implications

“Annexation” can have serious implications. For example, the residency and citizenship status of Palestinians in the proposed annexed territory is not yet clear. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said publicly that Palestinian residents in the areas to be “annexed” would not be given Israeli citizenship.

“Annexation” would also likely result in the mass expropriation of privately-owned Palestinian land and expropriation of other private property. The “annexation” of Israeli settlements will probably include the expropriation of agricultural lands owned by Palestinians in the OPT.

It deepens violations of the right to adequate housing. Israel’s “annexation” plan places individuals and communities - particularly communities in villages which are unrecognized by Israel - at risk of expulsion or targeting for home demolitions, especially if they fall within any “annexed” area.

The “annexation” of large parts of the West Bank would also further limit Palestinians’ freedom of movement. Many of the existing restrictions are directly linked to the settlements, including restrictions aimed at protecting the settlements and maintaining “buffer zones.”

The ongoing illegal blockade on Gaza and continuing separation of that part of the OPT from the rest works to entrench the fragmentation of the occupied population and is major factor in facilitating the “annexation” of parts of the West Bank.

9. Has provoked the following response from the Palestinian side

The Palestinian Minister of Foreign Affairs has commented that the “annexation” plan is “the most heinous public robbery of the occupied Palestinian land” and has called on the international community to impose sanctions on Israel.

In May, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas declared an end to the long-standing security coordination between the Palestinian authorities and Israel in response to “annexation” plans. The Palestinian Liberation Organization has called for the formation of an international coalition to confront Israel’s “annexation” plan.

On 15 June, senior Hamas official Salah al-Bardawil said at a press conference in the Gaza Strip that the Israeli “annexation” plan should be faced with “resistance in all forms,” and has called for popular Palestinian actions against the plan. On 25 June, Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ military wing, said that Israel’s plan to “annex” parts of the West Bank would be considered a “declaration of war” on the Palestinians.

On 1 July, Hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza protested against Israel’s annexation plan.

10. Has happened before

In 1967, Israel unilaterally “annexed” East Jerusalem and included this part of the city, as well as the surrounding area of 64 square kilometers, within the boundaries of the Israeli municipality of Jerusalem. The new municipal boundaries covered an area of 70 square kilometers. The additional lands belonged to about 28 Palestinian villages from surrounding areas and was delineated along specific coordinates to ensure the inclusion of maximum land with a minimum number of Palestinians.

Israel’s “annexation” of East Jerusalem, which remains part of the OPT under international law, has been repeatedly condemned by the international community through various UN Security Council resolutions.

Further, the Syrian Golan Heights came under Israeli occupation following the 1967 war. Thousands of Syrians were forcibly displaced from the Golan Heights as a result of the war and the occupation. Israel destroyed more than 100 villages, most of whose land was used for establishing illegal settlements. In 1981, Israel adopted the Golan Heights law which extends Israeli jurisdiction and law to the occupied Golan Heights. The “annexation” of the Golan Heights was specifically condemned by the UN Security Council in Resolution 497. - Amnesty International

#israel #occupied palestinian territories #amnesty international

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germainmottet-blog · 5 years

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Reshaping Dublin

As an exchange student, what surprises me when I walk around Dublin is, in addition to the number of pubs and the sympathy of the inhabitants, the number of construction sites. While Ireland is enjoying an economic renaissance, it still has to fight the housing shortage and prices.

Dublin's house prices have risen dramatically since the country officially entered a period of strong economic growth. In 10 years, these would have increased by almost 50%. At the same time, rental prices also increased by more than 10%. Economic development has necessarily attracted workers and investors. As a result, demand for housing has exploded. The real estate market would therefore be the victim of a return to growth and employment, with a construction sector that suffered a setback during the crisis and that must now catch up. The lack of housing is particularly acute in urban centres, which concentrate activity and generate the national average rent of more than 1,100 euros per month (according to the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI)).

In addition, the social housing stock represents only 7 to 8% of the market and is in dire need of affordable solutions. This creates a high dependence on the private sector, which is more expensive and whose prices fluctuate more quickly.

In an attempt to balance the market, the Irish government has made a number of announcements over the past few years, promising new projects, including social housing. In addition, the government has also decided to double the tax on vacant land to 7% to encourage owners of sites acquired after the property crash to develop construction. However, most social housing projects must be carried out by the private sector, whereas it would be cheaper to go through local authorities that own land and can build at a lower price. At the same time, the number of homeless people has increased by 23% in one year, a record high.

Another particularity of Dublin real estate is the strong presence of abandoned buildings and sites. The ghost building sites are reminiscent of the explosion of the 2010 real estate bubble on the island. Grilled by a booming economy during the "Celtic Tiger" period and encouraged by easily granted loans, many households and developers had started building housing before the financial crisis. Prices soared before exploding in 2010 in the midst of the global crisis, bringing down the country's banks and many individuals. Currently in a period of recovery, the country is finding solutions to finance the completion of these phantom projects through the cooperation of the government, local authorities, developers and banks.

All these transformations are not taking place without raising the fears of residents, threatened by property developers. As was the case in Berlin, which was in dire need of housing, expropriations of modest residences have increased to make way for more functional housing. Let us not forget either the other renovation work that causes many inconveniences.

In conclusion, Dublin is the scene of a new metamorphosis worthy of its new future status: that of a metropolis where economic growth and multiculturalism are intertwined.

#AdvancedPhotojournalism Dublin Housing

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howieabel · 7 years

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"Our opponents, interested defenders of the existing system, are in the habit of saying, to justify the right to property, that private property is the condition and guarantee of freedom. And we agree with them. Are we not always repeating that he who is poor is a slave? Then why are they our opponents? The reason is clear and is that in fact the property they defend is capitalist property, that is, property which allows some to live by the work of others and which therefore presupposes a class of dispossessed, propertyless people, obliged to sell their labour power to the property-owners for less than its value. The principle reason for the bad exploitation of nature, and of the miseries of the workers, of the antagonisms and the social struggles, is the right to property which confers on the owners of the land, of the raw materials and all the means of production, the possibility to exploit the labour of others and to organise production not for the well-being of all, but in order to guarantee a maximum profit for the owners of property. It is necessary therefore to abolish property. The principle for which we must fight and on which we cannot compromise, whether we win or lose, is that all should possess the means of production in order to work without subjection to capitalist exploitation. The abolition of individual property, in the literal sense of the word, will come, if it comes, by the force of circumstances, by the demonstrable advantages of communistic management, and by the growing spirit of brotherhood. But what has to be destroyed at once, even with violence if necessary, is capitalistic property, that is, the fact that a few control the natural wealth and the instruments of production and can thus oblige others to work for them. Imposed communism would be the most detestable tyranny that the human mind could conceive. And free and voluntary communism is ironical if one has not the possibility to live in a different regime — collectivist, mutualist, individualist — as one wishes, always on condition that there is no oppression or exploitation of others. Free then is the peasant to cultivate his piece of land, alone if he wishes; free is the shoemaker to remain at his last or the blacksmith in his small forge. It remains to be seen whether not being able to obtain assistance or people to exploit — and he would find none because nobody, having a right to the means of production and being free to work on his own or as an equal with others in the large organisations of production would want to be exploited by a small employer — I was saying, it remains to be seen whether these isolated workers would not find it more convenient to combine with others and voluntarily join one of the existing communities. The destruction of title deeds would not harm the independent worker whose real title is possession and the work done. What we are concerned with is the destruction of the titles of the proprietors who exploit the labour of others, expropriating them in fact in order to put the land, houses, factories and all the means of production at the disposal of those who do the work. It goes without saying that former owners would only have to take part in production in whatever way they can, to be considered equals with all other workers. Will property (in the revolutionary period) have to be individual or collective? And will the collective holding the undivided goods be the local group, the functional group, the group based on political affinity, the family group — will it comprise all the inhabitants of a nation en bloc and eventually all humanity? What forms will production and exchange assume? Will it be the triumph of communism (production in common and the distribution of goods on the basis of the work done by each individual), or individualism (to each the individual ownership of the means of production and the enjoyment of the full product of his labour), or other composite forms that individual interest and social instinct, illuminated by experience, will suggest? Probably every possible form of possession and utilisation of the means of production and always of distribution of produce will be tried out at the same time in one or many regions, and they will combine to be modified in various ways until experience will indicate which form, or forms, is or are, the most suitable. In the meantime, the need for not interrupting production, and the impossibility of suspending consumption of the necessities of life, will make it necessary to take decisions for the continuation of daily life at the same time as expropriation proceeds. One will have to do the best one can, and so long as one prevents the constitution and consolidation of new privilege, there will be time to find the best solutions. I call myself a communist, because communism, it seems to me, is the ideal to which mankind will aspire as love between men, and an abundance of production, will free them from the fear of hunger and will thus destroy the major obstacle to brotherhood between them. But really, even more than the practical forms of organisation which must inevitably be adjusted according to the circumstances, and will always be in a constant state of change, what is important is the spirit which informs those organisations, and the method used to bring them about; what I believe important is that they should be guided by the spirit of justice and the desire of the general good, and that they should always achieve their objectives through freedom and voluntarily. If freedom and a spirit of brotherhood truly exist, all solutions aim at the same objective of emancipation and will end by being reconciled by fusion. If, on the contrary, there is no freedom and the desire for the good of all is lacking, all forms of organisation can result in injustice, exploitation and despotism." - Errico Malatesta, Anarchism and Property

#Errico Malatesta #Communism #Anarchism #Anarchism and Property #Private Property #Anarchy #Socialism #Freedom #Production #Capitalism

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dist-the-rose · 4 years

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Chapter 32: Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation What does the primitive accumulation of capital, i.e., its historical genesis, resolve itself into? In so far as it is not immediate transformation of slaves and serfs into wage labourers, and therefore a mere change of form, it only means the expropriation of the immediate producers, i.e., the dissolution of private property based on the labour of its owner. Private property, as the antithesis to social, collective property, exists only where the means of labour and the external conditions of labour belong to private individuals. But according as these private individuals are labourers or not labourers, private property has a different character. The numberless shades, that it at first sight presents, correspond to the intermediate stages lying between these two extremes. The private property of the labourer in his means of production is the foundation of petty industry, whether agricultural, manufacturing, or both; petty industry, again, is an essential condition for the development of social production and of the free individuality of the labourer himself. Of course, this petty mode of production exists also under slavery, serfdom, and other states of dependence. But it flourishes, it lets loose its whole energy, it attains its adequate classical form, only where the labourer is the private owner of his own means of labour set in action by himself: the peasant of the land which he cultivates, the artisan of the tool which he handles as a virtuoso. This mode of production presupposes parcelling of the soil and scattering of the other means of production. As it excludes the concentration of these means of production, so also it excludes cooperation, division of labour within each separate process of production, the control over, and the productive application of the forces of Nature by society, and the free development of the social productive powers. It is compatible only with a system of production, and a society, moving within narrow and more or less primitive bounds. To perpetuate it would be, as Pecqueur rightly says, “to decree universal mediocrity". At a certain stage of development, it brings forth the material agencies for its own dissolution. From that moment new forces and new passions spring up in the bosom of society; but the old social organization fetters them and keeps them down. It must be annihilated; it is annihilated. Its annihilation, the transformation of the individualized and scattered means of production into socially concentrated ones, of the pigmy property of the many into the huge property of the few, the expropriation of the great mass of the people from the soil, from the means of subsistence, and from the means of labour, this fearful and painful expropriation of the mass of the people forms the prelude to the history of capital. It comprises a series of forcible methods, of which we have passed in review only those that have been epoch-making as methods of the primitive accumulation of capital. The expropriation of the immediate producers was accomplished with merciless Vandalism, and under the stimulus of passions the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious. Self-earned private property, that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent labouring individual with the conditions of his labour, is supplanted by capitalistic private property, which rests on exploitation of the nominally free labour of others, i.e., on wage labour.6 As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed the old society from top to bottom, as soon as the labourers are turned into proletarians, their means of labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialization of 6 “Nous sommes dans une condition tout-à-fait nouvelle de la société... nous tendons a séparer toute espèce de propriété d’avec toute espèce de travail.” [We are in a situation which is entirely new for society ... we are striving to separate every kind of property from every kind of labour] (Sismondi: “Nouveaux Principes d’Econ. Polit.” t. II, p.434.) 384 Chapter XXXIII labour and further transformation of the land and other means of production into socially exploited and, therefore, common means of production, as well as the further expropriation of private proprietors, takes a new form. That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the labourer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many labourers. This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the centralization of capital. One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this centralization, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the cooperative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as means of production of combined, socialized labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on cooperation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production. The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labour, into capitalist private property is, naturally, a process, incomparably more protracted, violent, and difficult, than the transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically resting on socialized production, into socialized property. In the former case, we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people.7 7 The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.... Of all the classes that stand face-to-face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes perish and disappear in the face of Modern Industry, the proletariat is its special and essential product.... The lower middle classes, the small manufacturers, the shopkeepers, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class... they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei,” London, 1848, pp. 9, 11.

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tarnauti-blog · 6 years

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a hopeless draft: on the suicidational imagination

In the post-revolutionary NEP era of the Soviet Union experts viewed suicide a residue of Bourgeois individualism’s symptomatic expression: social alienation. The symptom of suicide, it followed, would wither away with the withering away of ‘man’s estranged relation to man’. But this would mean the mighty task of truly eliminating class society in its totality: the state form, property, capital and all the other socially alienating abstractions.

It followed that suicide was diagnosed as a symptom of loss of faith in this program. Here we find the term Eseninism (in homage to the literary figure Sergei Yesenin) who launched a wave of suicides after taking his own life in 1925. Eseninism came to be considered as a contagious disease of the mind caused by the placing of the “I” over the “we” in one’s world view, which led to various anti-social forms of behavior.1

As repressions grew and the revolutionary horizon faded, the question of whether suicide, by cadre members, was the result of internal problems of the party itself or a private affair of the individual, became a more and more debated topic. Up into the late 1920’s expulsion from the party was among the official list of motives for suicide. In the height of those repressions, as dozens of suicides a week began in Leningrad, the anarcho-communist Viktor Serge came to consider them as a form of refusal and revolt:

What use is it to live if our party refuses us the right to serve it? This newborn world is calling us, we belong to it and it alone- and look! In its name someone spits in our faces. 'You are disqualified .... ' Disqualified because we are the revolution's racked flesh, its outraged reason? It is better to die."!"2

In the Foundation Pit, a novel written by Platonov in the early 30’s, a striking depiction of the scenario is presented in a semi-allegorical form. The novel grapples with the endemic lose of faith in the socialist project -- that crystalizes under Stalin -- as the anticipated communist society is repackaged as a distant reality that will not be lived by those in the present that labor toward it: as a collection of decaying bodies work day after day digging out the foundation for a grand collective house that is promised to shelter humanity from hardship; the characters alternate between the dreary acceptance of the pit as their collective graves (they will never inhabit the structure) and the fragile hope that comes with imagining themselves as a necessary sacrifice for future generations; as one step, of many, in socialisms march toward the promised communist horizon. Suicidal temptation lingers heavy in the air among other forms of ‘self-serving’ passions e.g. masturbation which is said to relinquish the bodies energies from the collective building project.

One can imagine how in these circumstances, suicide may be normatively imagined as a betrayal insofar as it is understood as a practice of social desertion: in making the exit the individual places themselves over the collective; as though my misery and anguish was somehow of greater affect than the collectively bared burden of social continuation under x conditions. The ancient Greeks captured the sentiment well in making a direct analogy between suicide and a soldiers desertion from his post.3 An analogy applied quite literally by a leading administrator of the Red Army in 1926: "He who is a conscious communist or a conscious worker cannot become a suicide because he does not belong to himself and is not his private property. Rather, he belongs to his party and to his class.”4

From the other side, one can imagine how the practice may be viewed as an aspiration to reclaim a stolen future that now appears imposed over you as an intransitive fate. By choosing to end things in the here and now one refuses to participate in the common building effort and, in doing so, symbolically re-agentifies history as a product of one’s own making. Self-death as insurgent temporality.

As I paged through 712 pages of obituaries in the first volume of A Complete Lexicon of Crisis Related Suicides: 2008-2013 a quite different historical context of suicidational yearning appears. Detailing the financial crisis and its aftermath in the US context, the primary subject of the book is the middle-aged homeowner who appreciated a relative degree of financial security; making them particularly vulnerable to maladjustment in the wake of its loss.5

Motives, in this case, seem more likely linked to a liberal market economy than the previously rehearsed context of socialist collectivism. The prospect of shelter as a collective object of desire and sacrifice is restructured in our present as the solitary undertaking of the mortgage holder. With the loan comes security, but this security is dependent on a number of less secure factors: to keep the house, to pay the loans, to pay the loans to keep the job, etc.

Mark Fisher made efforts to address this situation. He did so by picking up on how market competition, the seemingly continuous degeneration of public security (which he personally would have witnessed the withering of) and the formation of the indebted subject, all involved the offloading of enormous weight on the individual, imagined as entrepreneurial risk-taker. Fisher thus connected this concomitant global process of privatizing industry and public assets with the “privatization of stress”. By this he suggested a correlation between the significant drops in standards of living that played out over the 80's and mental stability. As one study found, between 1977 and 1985 rates of psychiatric morbidity rose from 22% to 31% of the UK population.2 This hypothesis is also demonstrated through the example of the New Labour party cutting “incapacity benefits” in the midst of the so called 'recovery' period of the 2008 crash.

While Fisher focuses on the side of depression, the suicidal imaginary can easily be considered a culmination of the lose of hope/self-loathing spiral. Within this scene one finds the melodrama of the subject who in presuming to be a free individual has only themselves to blame for their situation, which is thought of (reductively), as the accumulation of past choices. Suicide, in this context, could be imagined as a continuation of the problems that caused it, unfolding in the scene of: a fully cognisant person making a final autonomous choice.

In someway, this framing helps to understand the particularly high rates of suicide in the former Soviet Republic of Lithuania where the collapse of state socialism (91’) precipitated in a radical neoliberal restructuring process: 98% of the housing stock being privatized within several years of Independence (as one example).

With this restructuring emerged a new subject whose freedom was configured as one and the same with that of the market. In the first popular economic textbook (released in 1992) a frank notion of the new ideal of the citizen is put forth:

Economic man is a rational decision-maker who tries to achieve as much as possible with as little effort as possible. Moreover, he prefers to avoid taking risks, but is not unwilling to do so, if the probable reward is great enough. “Economic Man” is fully informed as to prices and technology. Furthermore, he knows what he likes and does not like. This means that he is perfectly capable of making all the choices that his economic adjustment requires.6

Finally delivered to freedom, Lithuania's economic man has only themselves to fault for their poor choices. Newly exposed to a tenacious variety of deregulated market risk this entrepreneurial subject found themselves as ideal residents for the architecture of despair being built before them in the context of a collapsing economy and financial system. While immigration has continued as the preferred mode of flight for able bodied labor power, suicide and other socially conflictual practices remain popular methods of internal flight for the senile, pauperized, and otherwise maladjusted.

In Bifo’s latest book, Heros: suicide and mass murder we find a similar mood unfolding on a world scale. Bifo begins by presenting the fact of a global suicide epidemic with reference to statistics by the World Health Organisation. He draws from wide geographical sources to demonstrate his thesis on a connection between the progressing authoritarianism of neo-liberal capital flows and suicidal practices as a desperate line of flight/confirmation of a fragmented and pacified resistance. The example of the infamous, well documented, Foxconn case(s) of worker suicides is compared with a lesser known wave at the French multinational Telecom (2002-2010), that resulted from a draconian restructuring policy aimed at squeezing profits via the imposition of competitive evaluative mechanisms that isolated; then a wave in South Indian agricultural communities reasoned as a consequence of globalisation via privatisations, financilization, land expropriations, etc.

Bifos particular explanation for the conditions that support the presents psychic disposition toward self-harm, closely echo (without referencing) Fisher:

exploitation, competition, precariousness, redundancy are not perceived as the effects of a conflictual social relationship, but are internalized as deficiencies of the self, as personal inadequacies. The unceasing restructuring of the organization of work is perceived as humiliation and brutality.”7

An overwhelming feeling of despair lingers in the air as you process the characters in these stories simultaneously capitulating to the determinations of capitalist exploitation and oppression while reflectively internalizing these determinations as self failures.

‘But how to avoid this doubling effect and its consequences?’ As maybe one of numerous questions Fisher himself could have been asking before taking his own life. Fisher's answer seemed to be in the project of building a support culture in the Left which would politicize individual affect as a social issue while cultivating a common future beyond the melancholic realism of capitalisms own.

Yet, the suicidal imagination persists insofar as these militant, forward looking programs and mass struggles are scarce. Operating within these conditions, suicidal practices may be seen as the solitary expression of latent social antagonisms. Not as the outward expression of an already summoned and mobilized collective body, but as a desperate injunction for the formation of one.

‘Is there a community beyond the communities organized by the commodity, the job and the bank?’

‘Is there a community that shares my misery and desires something other?’

Most of these calls into the darkness go unanswered. But every once in a while these vastly spontaneous, solitary revolts, become the rallying cry of the coming insurrection. Revolutionary action doesn't always require the slow and arduous process of building a mass organization.

Still, it brings the obvious question of: why did the protest suicide of the NYC taxi driver Dough Shifter8 go vastly unnoticed while the suicide of the Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi toppled a regime?9 A lot of this has to do with political mythology.

Going in this direction means considering politics as a practice of passive prophecy: not the active prescription 'this will be the future' but a careful scanning of the world for omens. This requires a certain acceptance of contingency in time. Here one could even draw association with broader arguments against political programmatism in ultra-left circles.

Meanwhile, Bifo, in focusing our attention more on the ineffectivity of contemporary revolts like Shifter’s -- or worse the ever growing atrocity of the outwardly directed suicide, e.g. the Batman massacre -- presents the suicidal imaginary as futile at best and pathological at worst. Protest deaths are just not seen to have lasting impacts in terms of building solidarity and collective power. Here the example of the French Telecom is deployed to illustrate a situation where there are no strikes, collective actions, union building, etc, after the wave of deaths. In addition, the infamous Foxconn case is pointed to where the company -- after the humanitarian outcry -- made various agreements, only to take back those agreements after things calmed down. In this sense, the suicidal drive is understood as a palliative (or symptom) for the present conditions of isolation without being proven to shake those conditions in any substantial way.

III

Connecting the presents suicidational disposition with a more general problematic of social separation in capitalism, Bifo is able to deliver a quite interesting connection with the Japanese hikikomori movement, who have come to see their near total withdrawal from social life as a means of preserving personal autonomy.

Taking the idea of separation in a different direction than Bifo, I would argue that suicide should not be reified as an isolatable pathology but generalized as a technique of both literal and symbolic detachment. In starting from here, one can disconnect suicide from the teleological end of literal self-murder and engage with its multivalent connotations – as suicidation: “not only the foreclosing act of finitude”12, but the broadly defined practice of inhabiting depersonalized time. In other words, the speculative leaning towards non-belonging as a zone of playful articulation and prefiguration of other possible worlds.

Lauren Berlant's work on the concept of detachment is useful for developing a theory of the suicidational imaginary. In Berlant's writing detachment designates a set of both intentional and unintentional practices. Detachment as: physical sickness, exhaustion, depression, but also as secession, excessive eating, literary disassociation, aloofness, coasting, strike. Importantly, Berlant is careful to question the concepts hasty incorporation into narratives of resistance. Reflecting on the idea in relation to depression she notes how the outlook of the state may vary, producing:

The prisonhouse or the lightness of not caring; or the freedom or vertigo from detaching and seeing multiple horizons; or the excited scanning or dark melancholy that might saturate everywhere when desire no longer has an object to give living on a discrete shape.12

Further, detachment is not conceived as attachments elimination, but rather as a suspension, and at times reshuffling, of roles and responsibilities, e.g., being sick doesn’t eliminate work but temporarily suspends the relation. Suicide should be thought on a similar plane, I think. While often romantically imagined as the apex of individual autonomy, perhaps more realistically unfolding as an incomplete grasping towards a mastery over negativity: incomplete insofar as death, after all, is a state foreign to all decision making -- however plotted the delivery to this end may be. Actual death is a kind of radical passivity in that your life is reduced to a symbol, which becomes the commonly owned property of a collectively recognized memory.13

The agency I find in suicidational practices seem to be in their capacity to demonstrate power’s immanence: its instability to those that believe they may hold it over others. For a subject who has become an object to authority to threaten their own extermination is to also threaten the subject of authority; who in depending on the preservation of their object - as the source of their power - is, in a way, under the tutelage of this object-being. Simon Weil provides a nice account of this tension:

Every victory won over men contains within itself a possible defeat, unless it goes so far as extermination. But extermination abolishes power by abolishing its object. Thus, there is in the very essence of power, a fundamental contradiction that prevents it from existing in the true sense of the word; those who are called the masters, ceaselessly compelled to reinforce their power for fear of seeing it snatched away from them are forever seeking a dominion essentially impossible to attain. [...] Consequently all power is unstable.

Given the situation, the threat of extermination, via a tactical self-exposure to vulnerability, may be approached as a leveraging position for the reconfiguration of dependencies. Think here of the actual mechanisms of the wild cat strike: the strike is on one hand a self-inflicted injury, given that payment has ended, while on the other hand, figuratively depicts the threat entailed in the actual ending of this profitable relation of dependency on the part of the employer.

As Foxconn workers discovered in their successful collective action of 2012 in which 200 people went to the roof and threatened to jump if wages and conditions were not bettered -- the collective threat of our absence may, after all, be a greater threat than our more passed attrition in individual acts of desertion, capitulation, withdrawal.

Interestingly, Marx also seemed to have approached the phenomena of self-harm as a form of revolt – in this case, to being possessed. In his annotated, selective, translation of Jacques Peuchet’s archive of suicide obituaries in Paris, emphasis is placed, by Marx, on the utilization of the practice by married women. It is exactly here that we find a subject inscribed, by law, under the authority of another whom choses to upend their dependency, as property, through self-destruction. While these accounts focus on actual deaths, one can easily imagine how the threat of death, in the circumstance of the women being an inventory item and object of investment, may be perceived as a type of theft. The following is a quite nice excerpt detailing the predicament:

The unfortunate wife was sentenced to the most intolerable slavery, and this slavery was only enforced by Monsieur de M... on the basis of the Code civil and the right of property, on the basis of social conditions which render love independent of the free sentiments of the lovers and allow the jealous husband to surround his wife with locks as the miser does his coffers; for she is only a part of his inventory.14

In a book on a current suicide epidemic in the southern Indian region of Kerala, Jocelyn Chua tells the story of Shaila, who after cutting her arm, gained a leverage over her husband who had become abusive lately. In figuratively suggesting the possibility of her absence, the power structure of the marriage, its domestic labors and hierarchies, was temporarily reshuffled in Shaila’s favor. The husband assumed greater responsibility in household activities and showed a general compliance toward Shaila’s needs.15

The invocation of suicide by women, in Kerala, is said to have become part of an everyday grammar for negotiating domestic relations. This grammar is not only utilized for gaining personal leverage in the power structure of domestic life, but also from the position of maternal sacrifice for family well being. Here the story of Kunjamma who undramatically disclosed her plot to take a loan in order to finance her son’s return to the Golf for work and then to drink poison to avoid having to pay it back.16 Whereas Kunjamma’s desire appears to align with the power structure of capitalist patriarchy -- to make the true sacrifice in order to preserve the middle-class status of the family unit -- Shaila’s appears as a form of personal insurgency against it.17

Chua makes an insightful comment on how Shailas act defies norms of agency associated with the liberal subject; given that there is neither the hero who successfully makes the autonomous choice to leave the marriage nor the tragic-hero who is murdered in her attempt. Instead, there is a type of agency which Chua, referring to Berlant, calls lateral: a reshuffling of power without grandiosity, a release of desire without full intentionality; a grappling toward life without virility.18

A gender dimension begins to emerge here. Set in contrast with the vastly masculine tradition of martyrdom – depending as it does on the spectacle of the transcendental will which by heroically refusing to submit to authority reclaims the abstract status of dignity or political existence -- lateral agency concerns a more subtle spread of influence. By way of analogy, the difference between the clearly distributed power of a speech in a public square and the gossip of witches spreading without clearly delineated territorial lines and authors.

While martyrdom is to some extent crippled by its reliance on the dialectics of lose and recovery, i.e., the idea that a lost dignity may be recuperated in the willful refusal of external determinations via self-negation; the predilection towards a kind of dispersed immanence, in the suicidational human strike, finds its own limitations in its assumption that the person making the demands bears some modicum of political status to leverage as a worth against that of death.

In other words, the suicidational imaginary, in grounding a politics on the idea of death as a leveraging position, seems to confront an impasse insofar as powers deliverability seems to rest on the assumption that the recipient, in the demand relation, has been recognized as a human being, i.e. as a dignified, non-killable, speaking being, a bearer of rights and status. This appears to be the case insofar as the threat of death only seems audible as a threat insofar as the subject making it is not already deemed socially dead: as relatively superfluous to the maintenance of social bonds. They must, in other words, be worthy of empathy in the eyes of empire.

Take, for instance, the case of the Palestinian child Ahed who after being imprisoned in Israel for slapping an officer gathered an international media outcry. Why did her case get picked up by the Western international media when so many children went unnoticed? Her appearance, passing as white, was as an absolutely foundational requisite for attracting empathy. For the suicidal human strike, the capacity of drawing empathy as a strategy of counter-interpolation that basically involves a forceful call to have one’s existence recognized as necessary for the life of the other, is essential.

What if one is to take as one’s starting point death as a condition as opposed to an alien incursion on life -- as numerous thinkers and revolutionaries have had to in the context of colonial/post- settings.

The question arises: what would it mean to act politically from a position of disposability, the position of the socially dead?

In an article by Kejhonti Nelom’s, titled ‘I don’t blame the Mexican men who robbed my white neighbor’, this question is addressed by way of a reflection on the near total disparity between a white persons experience of life-threatening situations as abnormal and that of a blacks, which are integrated into existence as a basic condition of being:

when I am murdered in the United States, it doesn’t matter where I am or what time of day, or who I was with, or what I was wearing. Our deaths are contingent on nothing. But white life, and white peoples’ ability to always find a better place and a better time where they are safe, is contingent on Black death.

Here the suicidational imagination would seem to necessarily turn toward the homicidal as an outwardly oriented violence becomes the logical answer for an inwardly denied and subjugated existence.

Yet, this violence must still come to terms with the aporia of negationary agency, as it was previously explored in the practice of literal self-annihilation, Suicide. The annihilation of the other may precipitate in the elimination of an opposition without the self-overcoming of the identity of oppressor and oppressed forged in the interaction -- in fact crystalizing the identities rather than actually overcoming them.

If to a certain extent the suicidal human strike resolves the aporia of negation, but remains lost in the closed ecology or swamp of immanence; the question then would be: is it possible to imagine the reconfiguration of this impasse in light of the circumstance of a seemingly foundational schism? Turning back to Nelom’s article the following strategy seems as good as any:

Maybe this world’s undoing looks like holding every individual white person at machete point and demanding their money or their life when they insist on turning our safe spaces into theirs at our expense.

Here we find an outwardly oriented violence, which is not delivered as a negation, while neither dependent on the impasse of a passively determined recognition.

1Lost to the collective, Eseninism (after Sergei Yesenin) was thought capable of literally infecting individuals and destroying there connection to the revolution,

2Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary 1901-194I, trans. and ed. Peter Sedgwick (London, 1963), 194. Cited in Lost to the collective, p.88

3On the ancient Greek assertion that suicide was the equivalent or a soldier's desertion from his post, see Alexander Murray, Suicide in the Middle 1\g,:s, vol. 2, The Curse on Sdf

Muuler (Oxford, 2000), 125.

4P. Tscl'rnin, "O samoubiistvakh," Sjnlfnihj1olitmbotn.ihr1, March '11, 1926, '2.2. (p.67 lost to colletive)

5The Complete Lexicon of Crisis Related Suicides: 2008-2013

6Aren Jon’as Isachsen’as & Carl’as Hamilton’as, Basic Economics: the transition from plan to market economy, Vilnius: Lalna Litera, 1992, p.55

7Bifo, p.166

8https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/02/06/nyregion/livery-driver-taxi-uber.html?referer=http%3A%2F%2Fm.facebook.com

9Banu Bargu on eventualist theory of justice. Why did Bouazizi burn himself: the politics of fate and fatal politics

10Berlant, http://kingsreview.co.uk/articles/do-you-intend-to-die-lauren-berlant-on-intimacy-after-suicide/

11Berlant puts this term out in a lecture, but from my knowledge it is never really developed in anyway. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PU4AzjY9rjI (13:48)

12Berlant, intimacy after

13For an interesting essay reflecting on suicide as aesthetic autonomy and its contradictions see, Thomas Osborne, Facinated dispossesion: suicide and the aesthetics of freedom

14https://www.marxistsfr.org/archive/marx/works/1845/09/suicide.htm

15Chua, 130

16Chua, 109

17Femenization of practice (113) If men's suicides are typically seen as self- authored acts directed against impersonal adversities, women's suicides are read as impulsive or fraudulent acts gone awry and directed at per- sonal troubles.

18Berlant, Slow Death.

19http://racebaitr.com/2018/07/11/i-dont-blame-the-mexican-men-who-robbed-my-white-neighbor/

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cryptobully-blog · 7 years

Text

Where Eminent Domain Meets the Blockchain

http://cryptobully.com/2018/03/where-eminent-domain-meets-the-blockchain/

Where Eminent Domain Meets the Blockchain

Just as a country’s borders drawn on a globe aren’t often exact, neither are the lines drawn on individual properties around much of the world. De Soto Inc., a socially-conscious joint venture between Overstock.com subsidiary Medici Ventures, Overstock founder Patrick Byrne and world-renowned Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, has plans to solve the problems of property titles with a developed global property registry system utilizing decentralized blockchain technology.

The vision of de Soto and Byrne is a simple one: by making property rights and claims of individuals publicly recorded and globally verified, they can enable the poor to safely unlock the value of their land; help to mollify disputes by clearly stating who claims what property; and empower local land ownership.

The venture, announced in December 2017, pairs de Soto’s decades worth of reform experience as the founder of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy think tank with Patrick Byrne’s enthusiasm for bitcoin and the capabilities of its underlying blockchain technology. In an interview with Bitcoin Magazine, both men discussed the purpose of their ambitious undertaking.

De Soto Inc. aims to create a global property registry blockchain as a utility that will unlock dead capital, help five billion people have modernized property rights, give information necessary to settle property conflicts/disputes and to fight terrorism by undermining terrorists’ business model.

From de Soto’s perspective, the prospect of having the logistical and entrepreneurial support of Patrick Byrne and Medici Ventures behind his vision was important. With Byrne and Medici at his side, de Soto hopes the new venture will highlight the differences between government views on property rights and the actual reality of property rights.

The noted economist stated, “For me it’s very simple. I’ve been behind what blockchain means for the world for a while, and the whole issue [of property ownership] was a natural meeting place for us. It’s the entrepreneurial ability and the strength of Patrick to be able to pull all of these things together.”

Handling Multiple Property Ownership Systems on One Blockchain

Property laws around the world vary wildly based on country, political/religious systems and particular ideologies. China, for example, does not allow citizens to “own” property, but rather lease it from the government (albeit some leases are for up to 99 years). Other countries with nomadic histories can have more lax views on property ownership than western counterparts.The idea of individuals owning private property as a “freehold estate” that they can pass on to other generations is not ubiquitous. De Soto Inc. addressed how they would manage to account for all of these different types of property ownership systems on a single blockchain.

De Soto emphasized that they were not trying to give any opinion or show preference for one type of property system or one country’s system over others. “What we’re doing is providing all sides information as to how actually the informal economy holds its assets on the basis of the ledgers that we are going to obtain from them.”

As Byrne pointed out, property ownership may be described by what “the central government says…but then there are the people and what they say. This will put a sunlight on all kinds of disputes or disagreements. They will all be surfaced and be able to be dealt with, rather than just be the source of underlying [conflicts].”

Both men reiterated that De Soto Inc. doesn’t plan to actually solve the problems or act as a mediator or judge in any capacity, but that they plan to “provide MASSIVE information” that would provide a “digital shortcut” that would connect the formal legal ways of recognizing property ownership in underdeveloped and developing countries with the reality of property ownership experienced by the people in those countries. As de Soto puts it:

[E]ach country has its own way of coming into the global spectrum. What we are doing is providing all that missing [property ownership] information of the two-thirds of the world which isn’t [already] published and make the connection between the systems so that they work themselves out, clash by clash…making sure that all that information is side by side and can be compared and connected anywhere in the world.

Eminent Domain Meets the Blockchain

“If we think about eminent domain,” said de Soto, “most of the problems you have in my part of the world…is not knowing whose rights you are affecting. In other words, eminent domain says the state can expropriate in certain conditions. But when you get to places like Peru…like Ethiopia or the Niger Delta or Algeria… the eminent domain laws don’t apply.”

What we have found out is that everywhere in the world, where those property rights don’t seem to match the global system, everything is already on existing ledgers.

De Soto Inc. now seeks a way to make “that mosaic of information” common by using “expert systems and blockchain technology” to create a platform that will showcase not only where land ownership lies, but where contradictions are and “who really controls things on ground zero as opposed to the law books.”

While De Soto Inc.’s stance may seem anti-authoritarian at first blush, De Soto believes their platform will give “everybody, including authorities, an idea of the volume, the enormous volume of people outside the legal system.” Authorities can then be made aware of a property rights problem before miscommunication leads to further issues.

Property With Multiple Ownership Claims on It

De Soto and Byrne take a rather pragmatic view toward the idea of accounting for disputed territories.

“When you get on the ground,” de Soto said, ”there is no such thing as a territory overlapping another one; there’s always a fence. We’re getting to the fences.”

There are multiple schools of thought on property rights and possession interest that could cause friction of those fences, such as the rightful claims of ownership over Jerusalem, which is a holy city for three major religions.

But, as de Soto pointed out, most of the property disputes heard of were based on claims to ownership. In other words, whether you believe Tibet is an Autonomous Region of China, or that the Eastern Ukraine should be free from Russian control is less important at any given moment then who owns, polices, taxes and protects the land that is subject to dispute.

As Byrne put it, “We are going to document possession.” The implication laid out elsewhere in the interview is that whatever claims or issues go beyond the idea of ‘possession=ownership’ is for the parties to the dispute to resolve (or not). De Soto Inc. does not claim to opine on anything beyond possession, the basic code to property law.

Disrupting the Terrorist Business Model

While property disputes can be nasty, a particularly difficult form for De Soto Inc. to wrestle with seems to be adverse possession, where someone knows they don’t have ownership rights to the land and tries to claim it anyhow. The most extreme version of this could be viewed as terrorist control in areas of the world. Byrne and de Soto, however, had an answer to the subject of “terrorism.”

“The ledgers are not drawn up by the terrorists,” said de Soto. “The ledgers are drawn up by the local people.”

Byrne elaborated on de Soto’s point:

One of Hernando’s great discoveries is that the business model of a terrorist is going into those local guys who run the ledgers and saying, ‘We’ll recognize your ledger if you give us support.’ And we can disrupt [that].

He added that maybe the best way to fight terrorism is to fight the business model. “What we are doing is a business disruption of the business models of ISIS and FARC and Al Qaeda and all these guys. The best way to disrupt the terrorists is to disrupt their business model.”

Is De Soto Inc.’s plan a herculean undertaking? It seemed after speaking with both men that they will even acknowledge that. But given the potential impact on the planet, both Byrne and de Soto seemed staunchly convinced this was the right thing for them to go “all in” on.

While the venture is capitalistic, or as Byrne put it, “We may make a few shekels in the process and that’s OK…” He reiterated that the venture was primarily a socially conscious undertaking — the fruition of both his and Hernando de Soto’s life’s work.

De Soto Inc. has plans to scale up in as many new territories as possible. According to de Soto, “We have requests from heads of state that go from Sub-Saharan Africa to the Maghreb, to Latin America to Asia, once we get our act on the ground, we will see which [areas] we will take on first…there are no geographical priorities.”

If De Soto Inc. can deliver on its goals, the only geographic restriction (currently) on the blockchain property registry system will be planet Earth.

Blockchain

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cryptochurp · 7 years

Text

De Soto Inc.: Where Eminent Domain Meets the Blockchain

Handling Multiple Property Ownership Systems on One Blockchain

As Byrne pointed out, property ownership may be described by what “the central government says...but then there are the people and what they say. This will put a sunlight on all kinds of disputes or disagreements. They will all be surfaced and be able to be dealt with, rather than just be the source of underlying [conflicts].”

Eminent Domain Meets the Blockchain

“If we think about eminent domain,” said de Soto, “most of the problems you have in my part of the world...is not knowing whose rights you are affecting. In other words, eminent domain says the state can expropriate in certain conditions. But when you get to places like Peru...like Ethiopia or the Niger Delta or Algeria… the eminent domain laws don’t apply.”

What we have found out is that everywhere in the world, where those property rights don’t seem to match the global system, everything is already on existing ledgers.

Property With Multiple Ownership Claims on It

De Soto and Byrne take a rather pragmatic view toward the idea of accounting for disputed territories.

“When you get on the ground,” de Soto said, ”there is no such thing as a territory overlapping another one; there’s always a fence. We’re getting to the fences.”

Disrupting the Terrorist Business Model

“The ledgers are not drawn up by the terrorists,” said de Soto. “The ledgers are drawn up by the local people.”

Byrne elaborated on de Soto’s point:

If De Soto Inc. can deliver on its goals, the only geographic restriction (currently) on the blockchain property registry system will be planet Earth.

This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine.

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