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The Forum > Article Comments > There is a war on ordinary people and feminists are needed at the front > Comments

There is a war on ordinary people and feminists are needed at the front : Comments

By John Pilger, published 7/6/2013

With honourable exceptions, the bourgeois media club relegates and distracts from the fact that a full-blooded class war is under way.

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I have been doing a lot of thinking on the way social structures are created and what might cause them to change from an apparently stable condition to another apparently stable one. I'm not really interested in the role of individual people or specific structures as much as the environmental factors, such as the energy available to the society, the population density, trade.

It seems to me that social structures are inherently stable in the absence of a significant environmental change and that the less energy available, the more stable they are. In other words, the primary impetus for social dynamism is environmental and that energy is what drives it all. The individual human responses are interesting or tragic or inspiring but they don't lead to an empirical undertanding of the behaviour of the system.

It also seems to me that the rate of change in the environmental factors is important. A population that slowly increases will not be as destabilising as one that has a sudden spurt in growth. A sudden change in energy availability in either direction will be much more disruptive than a slow gain due to better farming practises. Trade with familiar partners won't disrupt like a sudden influx of new products.

There are feedbacks, of course. Population and energy are entwined and influence each other. Technology makes more energy acessible and population increases, or population increases and can access a larger area to source energy.

The worst social disruption occurs when there is a sudden increase or decrease in energy leading to fighting and war or social revolution and a change in the essential structure of society, especially in the distributive mechanisms.

The spike in population and energy availability over the last 500 years has created enormously disruptive and rapid change.

Feminism was a creation of the corporatist model that lead to globalism. I'm not sure it will survive through the next transition phase, which I suspect will be here within a decade or so, following the surge in available energy caused by globalism
Posted by Antiseptic, Friday, 7 June 2013 5:50:06 PM
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The assault on living standards, permanent work and the environment is largely due to population growth.

Loading the planet ( incl. Australia) with more of our species is stupidity.

Balanced migration ( numbers out = in ) and Govt incentives for 2 children at around 30 years of age , is a "no brainer" for Australia and other countries of the World .

The "opportunity cost" of growth means we are investing in more people
(pollution) and not into quality outcomes of education, research, health and conservation.

In the next Senate election, vote preferentially for the Stable Population Party and join a force for good, rather than lies and wishful thinking.

Very best John,
Ralph
Posted by Ralph Bennett, Friday, 7 June 2013 6:09:33 PM
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I adore John Pilger, but like so many men of the far left, he has his blind spots about women’s role in the so-called class struggle.

The late stages of Pilger’s impressive career have coincided with an unprecedented (but still woefully inadequate) appearance of women in positions of significant political power. However, these women – Hillary Clinton, Condoleezza Rice, Angela Merkel, Julia Gillard et al – have not fulfilled the male-Marxist fantasy of strong female class warriors for the common man [sic]. Instead, they quickly established themselves as class warriors, but for the ‘other side’. They have joined with the male establishment to screw the poor of both genders.

These women are mostly from privileged backgrounds and/or rightly made up their minds early on that the only route to political power is a social-conservative one. As every politician (and journalist) knows, if you want a mainstream career, then leftist politics is suicide. It shouldn’t be like that, but it is.

However, as gender warriors (as opposed to class strugglers), women like Gillard are fulfilling an important role of being visible to women and young girls as models of power and influence. In this, they have played an important feminist role. To conflate the class struggle with the gender struggle, as Pilger does, is to remain ignorant of the common fact of life for all women – i.e. that regardless of wealth or class, women must still operate within subcultures governed by men's rules.
Posted by Killarney, Friday, 7 June 2013 6:55:24 PM
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Ralph Bennett - Balanced migration is a "no brainer" for Australia and other countries of the World

That good, given the demonstrable lack of functional grey cells typical of the red-headed witch and the RAbbott
Posted by praxidice, Friday, 7 June 2013 7:18:56 PM
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Ralph, a stable population is not a realistic possibility unless it is in an equilibrium with the energy available, which would mean a sustained period of depopulating and a massive reduction in fossil fuel use. Don't like your chances.

Killarney:"male-Marxist fantasy of strong female class warriors for the common man"

I have that one all the time. Then I wake up screaming.
Posted by Antiseptic, Friday, 7 June 2013 9:10:00 PM
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While a don't agree with Pilger's Maxist philosophy, he speaks a lot of truth that I agree with.

It is not a left/right argument,but one of fairness and the elites with their debt money creation system have the planet stuffed. World GDP = $70 trillion, world debt = $40 trillion. The debt can never be repaid because on average,the debt is more than twice the principal.

The elites almost have absolute power and they know it. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Their Bilderberg Meeting is now happening at Watford in England.140+ of the world's richest and most influential people meet each year to determine your future and mostly, they don't want you to have one. You are infringing on their planet and with advanced robotics,human labour and intelligence is mostly redundant to them.
Posted by Arjay, Friday, 7 June 2013 9:24:57 PM
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