Thursday, June 17, 2010

"Seize BP", however, is OK with me

Read about the campaign here.

1 comment:

dnw said...

Agreed. Anger with BP is good, but it should be the catalyst for broader institutional critique. My fear is that people are attacking BP so that they don't have to critique the system. Conversely, institutional critique musn't be an abstract pursuit. It needs to take place at the level of concrete, radical interventions. To villify BP is fine, as long as its for the right reasons. Thus, the claim should not be "BP is evil because the company made X, Y, Z mistakes, was irresponsible for reasons 1, 2, 3 (this logic is deeply complicit in capitalist ideology, as if being a good oil company is a matter of being responsible, environmentally-conscious, etc), but rather, BP is evil because it is an oil company." If we villify BP for what it is (an oil company), then we have an concrete intervention against capitalistm at the ideological level.