memewars_guardianreview

8/23/2019 MemeWars_Guardianreview

1/5

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How we madeWere Going on a Bear Hunt

Drawinga lineCan Adbusters changethe way we thinkabout economics?


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The newstylerebels

Last November, 70 Harvardeconomics students walkedout of a lecture by theirfaculty head, Greg Mankiw.Angry at the conservative

nature of Harvards economics course,they were suspicious of their lecturersfailure to predict the ongoing financialcrisis, and their unerring faith in thetheories that led to the crisis in the firstplace. So up stood the students, and out

they went to join a march organised byOccupy Boston instead.

Its this kind of campus reaction thatKalle Lasn wants to inspire with hislatest book, Meme Wars the CreativeDestruction of Neo-Classical Economics.I want to light a fire under the economicstudents around the world, he says.I can imagine a few of them asking:how come we are still being taught theold economics? Why did not even onein a hundred of you professors see themeltdown coming? Its an invitationto the students who get wind of thebook to create a bit of a ruckus within

the university.Lasn is the founder and editor of

Adbusters, the very leftwing, verywell-designed magazine that hasrailed against consumerism since 1989.Among other successful stunts,Adbusters has popularised TV TurnoffWeek where, as you would expect,millions try to avoid television forseven days. Then theres the annualBuy Nothing Day, which is again fairlyself-explanatory. Both campaigns gohand in hand with what Adbustersis most famous for: culture-jamming,or subvertising, which sees themagazines team create spoof versionsof well-known adverts. Its also theorgan that invented the concept ofOccupy Wall Street, and Lasn is

the man who first registered themovements website.

Like anyone involved in Occupy,Lasn doesnt want to be identified as itsfigurehead or posterboy. He is proud ofthe movements horizontal structure,and has been running from the authori-tarian left since he was a child. Bornin Tallinn in 1942, his family fled theRussian invasion two years later. For thenext half-decade, he lived in a Germanrefugee camp, before spending the next

two decades in Australia and Japan.

Lasn made it to Canada in 1970, wherehe now lives on a small farm outsideVancouver, apparently padding to workin wellington boots. Before foundingAdbusters, he made TV documentariesthat critiqued capitalism. Yet he defineshimself against consumerism, ratherthan with the old-school left.

For the past 15 to 20 years, we atAdbusters have been saying we have tojump over the dead body of the old left,he says. Im not all that interested in thepolitical left, unless its this new hori-zontal left thats coming out of Occupy.

But Meme Wars is not, he stresses,

a manifesto for Occupy, a movementoften criticised for its lack of direction.It is nevertheless an attempt to dowhat Occupy couldnt: its a radicaleconomics textbook that Lasn hopeswill spread the spirit of Occupy fromthe town square to the universitycampus. It was of the things that theOccupy movement didnt quiteachieve, unlike in 1968 the greatmoment in my life, when I becamepoliticised, he says. For some weirdreason, when almost the same thing[as 1968] happened in Zuccotti Park,and then spread around the world likeit did in 68, it didnt really happen inthe universities.

The book is billed as an alternativetextbook, and it certainly looks it.

mages frome Lasn and

dbusters bookeme Wars:want to lightfire underudentsound theorld, he says

Adbusters magazinehas been visuallysubverting capitalismfor 20 years. Here itsfounder Kalle Lasnoutlines his neweconomic manifestoto Patrick Kingsley


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Meme Wars isbilled as analternative

textbook, butits pages are afar cry from theusual economicsprimers

Adbusters pastiches adverts to satiriseconsumerism and Meme Wars doessomething similar for economicsprimers. Darling! reads a subvertedimage of two 50s lovers. Lets get deeplyinto debt. Elsewhere, graphs that charteconomic growth over the past half-

century are overlayed with ones thatshow a simultaneous rise in depressionand pollution. While the texts contentis pretty dense, visually it has the lookand feel of a messy scrapbook or graphic

novel. There arent even any pagenumbers: a rejection of what Lasn seesas the faux-rationalism of mainstreameconomics. Thats deliberate. We dontlike page numbers. Its one of the left-cortex things that you dont actuallyneed if you want to understand some-

thing such as economics.Lasn sees three problems with con-ventional economics teaching. First:orthodox or neo-classical economicshas brought the world to the brink of

financial ruin. Second: by fostering aconsumer culture, it has turnedhumanity into a selfish, anxious race.Third: it fetishises economic growth even though this growth is ultimatelydestructive, since it both makes usunhappy and wreaks unsustainable

havoc on the planets natural resources.This is one of the most fatal flaws inneo-classical economics, says Lasn, ina delicate Estonian lilt that beliesthe passion of his argument. We


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cannot keep on selling off our

natural capital and calling itincome. Its the moststupid mistake ofall When they measure growth, theydont measure real progress.

The they to which he refers is theeconomics establishment. People suchas Harvards Greg Mankiw, whose text-book, Principles of Economics, is taughtin many universities, and which Lasnargues helps entrench the values oforthodox economics in the minds of eachsuccessive generation of economists,who then use their influence to maintainthe status quo inside governments.

Lasns modest hope is therefore to

inspire the next generation to grabMankiw and his brethren by the scruffof their neck and throw them out ofpower. In a sense, I am calling for ascientific revolution: a revolution wherethe new guard the heterodox, maverickpeople who have been sniping for a longtime rise to the top and finally createa new kind of economics. Once thathappens, Lasn argues, a new crop ofeconomists will emerge and theyllbecome economic advisers to the peoplerunning governments all around theworld, and bit by bit the whole practiceof economics can begin to heave.

As Lasn himself acknowledges, hishopes are not new. In fact, Meme Warsis structured around the thoughts ofleftwing economists who have been

sn and hisdbusters teamke aim atrporations,pitalism andnsumerism

making these arguments for years. The

book features interviews with JosephStiglitz, and essays by, among others,Herman Daly and George Akerlof. We,says Lasn of his colleagues at Adbusters,who helped him edit the book, tookall these people who we had fallen inlove with over the years, and we puttogether a jigsaw puzzle of them.

Meme Wars takes those existingradical arguments and uses them toflesh out what Lasn sees as a new(ish)brand of radical economics. Somethingthat is humbler than the orthodoxschools that doesnt hubristically seeitself as an exact, rational science, but a

social one. Lasn suggests the concept of

psychonomics economics that takesinto account human behaviour orbionomics, which bears in mind thecost of environment damage. Therehas been a maverick tradition out therethat has been snapping at the heels ofthe dominant paradigm for a long time,he argues. But they havent quite zeroedin on exactly what [the alternative] couldbe. And I thought of those two words.

There is no faulting Lasns ambition.At the risk of sounding a bit grandiose,he says, Meme Wars is an attempt todo something that actually could puthumanity on a new path. Of course, it

probably isnt quite as revolutionary asall that. Behavioural and no-growtheconomics already exist as concepts.Tim Jacksons Prosperity Beyond Growthand Ha-Joon Changs 23 Things TheyDont Tell You About Capitalism are justtwo recent books that also contradicttraditional economic ideas. But MemeWars with its unusual visuals andcollation of todays main radicalthinkers is nevertheless a welcomeaddition to the fray. And if its uniquegraphics can turn a few more headsthan its predecessors on campus,then so much the better.

Meme Wars: the Creative Destruction of Neo-

Classical Economics, by Kalle Lasn/Adbusters,is published by Penguin, 19.99.


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Meme Wars isan attempt todo somethingthat could puthumanity ona new path,says Lasn

memewars_guardianreview

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