Brian Martin: Nonviolence versus Capitalism

See, for example, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “A critique of political ecology,” New Left Review, No. 84, March-April 1974, pp. 3-31; James Ridgeway, The Politics of Ecology (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970).

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962).

Carol Van Strum, A Bitter Fog: Herbicides and Human Rights (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1983).

Joseph A. Camilleri, The State and Nuclear Power: Conflict and Control in the Western World (Melbourne: Penguin, 1984); André Gorz, Ecology as Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1980); Robert Jungk, The New Tyranny: How Nuclear Power Enslaves Us (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1979).

Jim Falk, Global Fission: The Battle over Nuclear Power (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1982); Wolfgang Rüdig, Anti-Nuclear Movements: A Worldwide Survey of Opposition to Nuclear Energy (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1990).

On the US experience see Barbara Epstein, Political Protest and Cultural Revolution: Nonviolent Direct Action in the 1970s and 1980s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

For the technical side of this approach, see Amory B. Lovins, Soft Energy Paths: Toward a Durable Peace (New York: Ballinger, 1977).

Where nuclear power is part of the electricity generating system, it is hard to avoid using some nuclear-produced electricity without disconnecting from the electricity grid. Avoiding this has not been treated as significant in antinuclear campaigning.

Anders Boserup and Andrew Mack, War Without Weapons: Non-violence in National Defence (London: Frances Pinter, 1974); Robert J. Burrowes, The Strategy of Nonviolent Defense: A Gandhian Approach (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996); Gustaaf Geeraerts (ed.), Possibilities of Civilian Defence in Western Europe (Amsterdam: Swets and Zeitlinger, 1977); Stephen King-Hall, Defence in the Nuclear Age (London: Victor Gollancz, 1958); Brian Martin, Social Defence, Social Change (London: Freedom Press, 1993); Michael Randle, Civil Resistance (London: Fontana, 1994); Adam Roberts (ed.), The Strategy of Civilian Defence: Non-violent Resistance to Aggression (London: Faber and Faber, 1967); Gene Sharp with the assistance of Bruce Jenkins, Civilian-Based Defense: A Post-Military Weapons System (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

Martin, Social Defence, Social Change, chapter 14.

John Madeley, Big Business, Poor Peoples: The Impact of Transnational Corporations on the World’s Poor (London: Zed Books, 1999).

Richard J. Barnet and John Cavanagh, Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994); William Greider, One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997); David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World (London: Earthscan, 1995); Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith (eds.), The Case Against the Global Economy and for a Turn toward the Local (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996).

Portions of this section are adapted from Wendy Varney and Brian Martin, “Net resistance, net benefits: opposing MAI,” Social Alternatives, Vol. 19, No. 1, January 2000, pp. 47-52.

David Wood, “The international campaign against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment: a test case for the future of globalization?,” Ethics, Place and Environment, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2000, pp. 25-45.

For critical views, see for example Kristin Dawkins, Gene Wars: The Politics of Biotechnology (New York: Seven Stories, 1997); Michael W. Fox, Beyond Evolution: The Genetically Altered Future of Plants, Animals, the Earth — and Humans (New York: Lyons Press, 1999); Brewster Kneen, Farmageddon: Food and the Culture of Biotechnology (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 1999); Vandana Shiva, Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000); Martin Teitel and Kimberley A. Wilson, Changing the Nature of Nature: Genetically Engineered Food (London: Vision, 2000).

Vandana Shiva, Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (Totnes, Devon: Green Books, 1998).

Tom Greaves (ed.), Intellectual Property Rights for Indigenous Peoples: A Sourcebook (Oklahoma City: Society for Applied Anthropology, 1994).

For some ideas about campaigning against intellectual property, see Brian Martin, “Against intellectual property,” in Information Liberation (London: Freedom Press, 1998), pp. 29-56.

Free Software Foundation, 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston MA 02111-1307, USA; gnu@gnu.org; http://www.gnu.org/.

A useful review is Gary Moffat, “Building economic alternatives,” Kick It Over, #29, Summer 1992, pp. 4-12.

Richard Douthwaite, Short Circuit: Strengthening Local Economies for Security in an Unstable World (Totnes, Devon: Green Books, 1996).

Douthwaite, Short Circuit ; Thomas H. Greco, Jr., New Money for Healthy Communities (Tucson, AZ: Thomas H. Greco, Jr., PO Box 42663, Tucson AZ 85733, USA, 1994).

Also important here are microfinance systems serving the poor, such as the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh: see Muhammad Yunus with Alan Jolis, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle against World Poverty (New York: PublicAffairs, 1999).

On the non-neutrality of money see Nigel Dodd, The Sociology of Money: Economics, Reason and Contemporary Society (London: Polity, 1994). On the psychology of money, see Dorothy Rowe, The Real Meaning of Money (London: HarperCollins, 1997).

The Simple Living Collective, American Friends Service Committee, San Francisco, Taking Charge: Achieving Personal and Political Change through Simple Living (New York: Bantam, 1977).

J. K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996).

André Gorz, Strategy for Labor: A Radical Proposal (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967).

Roland Bleiker, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).