(2004-07-30) Pl Wilson Interview

Interview with Peter Lamborn Wilson from his home in upstate NY. We have all these knee-jerk phrases that in the sixties sounded like communist revolution, and now are just corpses in the mouths of real estate developers. "SustainableDevelopment"-that means very expensive houses for vaguely ecologically conscious idiots from New York. It has nothing to do with a sustainable economy (Sustainable Capitalism) or PermaCulture. They talk about agriculture, they get all weepy about it, but they won't do anything for the family farms because family farms use pesticides and fertilizers, which is a terrible sin in the minds of these people... I don't think that we can consider ourselves guiltless and not implicated in all this because we're creative and artsy and have leftist emotions. Where are our actual alternative Institution-building energies? Where are our food co-ops? Where's our support for the Mexican migrant agricultural workers? Most people here are not interested in that... Or that getting a million people to come out and wave symbolic signs at a symbolic march is a political act. If it doesn't involve alternative economic institution building, it's not. As an Anarchist, I've had this critique for years, and experience has only deepened it... There was a time when everything was so confused and chaotic that it was easy to believe that this technology (Internet/World Wide Web) would be an exception to all the other technologies, and instead of enslaving us, it would liberate us. I never actually believed that, but I was willing to talk to people who did. Now I'm not willing to talk to them anymore. I have no interest in this dialogue. It's finished. The Internet revealed itself as the perfect mirror image of Global Capital. It has no borders? Neither does global capital. Governments can't control it? Neither can they control global capital... I want to see somebody set up a Barter network where I could trade poetry for turnips. Or not even poetry - lawn cutting, whatever. I want to see the Internet used to spread the Ithaca dollar system (Ithaca Hours) around America so that every community could start using alternative labor dollars. It is not happening... Where did we cross that line where we forgot that making a documentary about how everyone would like to have a Food CoOp is not the same as having a food co-op? I think some people have lost that distinction. Now, about art in the service of the revolution: There is no art in the service of the revolution, because if there's no revolution, there's no art in its service... We have only capital, so all art is either in its service or it fails. Those are the two alternatives. If it's successful, it's in the service of capital (Capitalism). I don't care what the content is.