Against The Megamachine: Essays On Empire And Its Enemies

Description

Urban-industrial civilization is a vast junkyard. Everything, from the planets to the cells of our bodies, is contaminated with its poisons. What it means to be human is now in dangerous flux, while the entire edifice sways over us, threatening to crash down in ruins. The green world in which we evolved is being shredded by our instruments and our way of life... David Watson's wide-ranging essays - published in the Fifth Estate, one of North America's most original radical journals - ponder such themes as the state, empire and war; humanity's tragic relation to the natural world; and the contemporary mass society generated by industrial capitalism and modern technology. His impassioned critique offers a vision of social transformation open to diverse possibilities, and suggests where a new politics must begin: as a radical challenge to the mystique of progress, in defense of nature, memory and spirit. "David Watson is one of the handful of thinkers and authors who have managed to address technology in all of its dimensions - its effects on individual consciousness, on political power, on social and cultural forms, and on the natural world - to reveal something far more profound and terrifying, though still beneath the awareness of the public and the otherwise politically engaged community of activists. Technology must move to the forefront as an activist issue, and only through works like this will we understand the subject well enough to act." - Jerry Mander Introduction by Richard Drinnon PART I: CATCHING FISH IN CHAOTIC WATERS 1. Catching Fish in Chaotic Waters: An Essay on Empire and Mass Society PART II: WE ALL LIVE IN BHOPAL 2. Notes on the Disappearance of History 3. Earth Day? We Want a Festival of the Oppressed 4. We All Live in Bhopal 5. Stopping the Industrial Hydra 6. Biosphere 2 and the Future of the Earth 7. Six Theses on Nuclear Power PART III: AGAINST THE MEGAMACHINE 8. The Fall of Communism & the Triumph of Capital 9. Against the Megamachine 10. The Snowmobile Revolution: Notes on Technological Invasion 11. The Language of Domestication & the Domestication of Language 12. Anarchy & the Sacred 13. Beyond Anarchism? 14. The Failure of Civilization & the Failure of Noam Chomsky 15. A Humble Call to Subvert the Human Empire PART IV: CIVILIZATION IN BULK 16. Civilization Is Like a Jetliner 17. Civilization in Bulk: Empire and Ecological Destruction 18. Insurgent Mexico: Redefining Revolution and Progress for the 21st Century 19. Deep Ecology & Environmental Philosophy: On the Ethics of Crisis and the Crisis in Ethics 20. Homage to Fredy Perlman (1934-1985) 21. The Unabomber & the Future of Industrial Society PART V: THESE ARE NOT OUR TROOPS 22. 1492-1992: The Fall of the 500-Year Reich 23. Looking Back on the Vietnam War 24. War in the Persian Gulf: Imperial Death Trip to Nowhere 25. These Are Not Our Troops: This Is Not Our Country 26. Watching the Dogs Salivate: Remarks on the 1992 Elections 27. On the Road to Nowhere: The New Nomadism