On the Necessity to Change the
Course
Catastrophes related to massive
man-made changes of the global weather pattern abound today – whether we
think of Pakistan, Chad, Brazil, Bangla Desh, India, China, Poland, Canada,
the U.S., the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, Australia, or
Central America. Both exceptionally arid periods (especially in the
Sahel zone and in central Spain, where desertification is progressing)
and increasing occurrences of exceptional rainfall and devastating floods
have been in the news again and again.
The thirst for maximum financial
gain, the market, in short, the dynamics of globalized capitalism with
its ‘productivist’ logic, a myopic penchant for what economists call ‘cost-benefit’
analysis, and a deep-seated disregard for costs that are not immediately
‘monetary’ (and therefore, affecting profits) have become a main cause
of such catastrophic developments that condition our actual perception
of ‘climate change.’
The present, largely globalized
economic system has not only been for many decades a main cause of worldwide
trends that we now refer to as ‘climate change’. It is a main cause of
other ecologically disruptive effects and gravely disturbing social ills,
as well. It is hardly possible any more to ignore the poisoning of oceans,
soils and ground water (that is, the water we all drink). Or massive air
pollution and acid rain hurting our forests everywhere but especially in
North America, Europe and East Asia. Deep-sea drilling in the Gulf of Mexico,
oil exploration in the Niger delta, in the rain forests of Ecuador and,
recently, also the polar regions of Siberia has been undertaken with
the unscrupulous disrespect for ‘mother nature” worthy of 19th century
industrial ‘robber barons.’ And then, of course, as if the deforestation
in Amazonia, the Congo, and Indonesia wasn’t enough, we see reckless mining
ventures eager for gold, coltan, and other ‘commodities’ that fetch high
prices in the world market poison the environment of local populations,
from Peru and Canada or Australia to Chad and China. It is not only the
lumber industry that is driven by the quest for “success in the market.”
Such ravaging ventures are all alike, in this respect, as they seek maximum
benefits for their shareholders. As for deforestation, which has such grave
consequences for the global climate, it is more recently not only propelled
by lumber companies. It is also occurring as a consequence of irresponsible,
market-driven expansion of cash crop production, especially for ethanol
that is now “demanded” by supposedly “ecologically conscious” economic
agents in the so-called First World. We all know that ethanol production
does not only take place in regions featuring tropic rain forests where
forests are cleared to make room for farmers eager to harvest soy beans.
It is not only ecologically insane. The conversion of increasingly more
agriculturally used acreage to ethanol production has driven up the cooking
oil price and the price of rice in S.E.Asia, amongst other items, thus
forcing the poor to make do with one meal a day. A trend that is resulting
in increasing malnutrition and starvation. But of course, hunger is an
endemic problem in much of the so-called Third World, tied to latifundism,
to unjust tenancy systems, high levels of land rent, indebtedness of peasants,
unequal exchange (or lack of what some call ‘fair trade’), etc. Today,
we witness again globally increasing hunger, and this is apparently largely
due to commodity speculation.
The economic system has been
called ‘productivist,’ which sounds positive. But it subordinates production
to other than real human needs. The necessity to satisfy such basic longings
as freedom from want (especially from lack of housing, food, clothing,
immaterial culture, etc.) and the quest for a healthy environment
are disregarded. True democratic participation of all is rejected and seen
as an obstacle. Maximum productivity and an enormous output of goods of
often questionable quality or use (but nonetheless expected to be sold
“in the market” at a profit) have appeared side by side with excessive
destructiveness.
In the 20th century, alternative
experiments and projects opposed to the irrationalities of blind market
forces that have proved, again and again, to be largely unresponsive to
our real needs have claimed to represent reason rather than blindness,
foresight rather than myopic perspective, the humane and solidaire longings
of all rather than the anti-humanistic and particular interests of the
few.
We know that these experiments,
for reasons that need to be discussed, have largely ended in failure.
What was “sold” to the population
by propaganda as “real socialism” or even “communism” remained attached
to productivist principles although the impact of the market was reduced
in some respects.
One of the gravest charges levelled
against dissidents by the bureaucratic political and economic ‘elites’
that commanded the Communist Parties was “making people equal.” These people
abhorred what the common people often came to desire: egalitarianism. The
put their trust in incentives, in ‘economic stimuli’ just as the advocates
of capitalist social relationsships put their trust in them. And just as
is the case in the West today (and has been all along), it was not only
economic equality that was rejected. Factual (rather than verbally, i.e.
ideologically asserted) political equality was seen as undesirable, too.
After all the political and the economic side of society cannot be truly
separated. To command or control or heavily influence the economy implies
political power. This is as true in the openly capitalist West as it was
true in openly state capitalist ‘real socialism.’ There it was customary
that directors of large economic trusts (so-called ‘combines’ that would
include several fields of economic activity, a pattern pioneered incidentally
by U.S. trusts in the late 19th century) would earn 20, 30 or even 40 times
the wage of an average worker. This is perhaps ‘peanuts’ compared with
the salaries and bonus payments of the top management of profitable corporations
in the West today where payments one thousand times the average salary
of a worker living in the same country have been ascertained. But is certainly
shows that these bureaucatric leaders of Communist Parties and state-controlled
industry in the now defunct ‘socialist’ East desired eveything except communism,
as practiced by Buddha or Jesus of Nazareth and his early disciples (the
‘original’ christian communist communities), later on Hussites in Central
Europe, Levellers in England, Shakers etc. and, even today, Hutterers
in the U.S. Or dreamed of, by utopians like Charles Fourier. And envisioned,
as a society of free and equal men, by Marx who pointedly rejected dogmatism,
exclaiming, Je ne suis Marxist (“I’m not a Marxist,” meaning that he was
not somebody who was keen to enshrine the empirical scientific knowledge
regarding the reality and contradictions of 19th century Capitalism that
he was able to study, as an immutable ‘system of knowledge’).
Bureaucratic decision-making
processes by power-monopolizing political, administrative and technocratic
‘elites’ helped silence the voice of the people, in the defunct system
that was in place in Eastern Europe. It is true that the masses (urban
workers, landless peasants, soldiers) had been actively involved in the
revolution that overthrew the Czarist system. Just as the American revolution
of 1776 was in danger of being defeated by the British and their Hessian
mercenaries, just as the French revolution of 1789 was immediately attacked
by the armies of despotic European monarchs, the young revolution found
itself assailed by internal and external foes (among them Germany, Britain,
France, Japan, and in covert fashion, the U.S.). Leaders who had experienced
the terror of Czarist oppression were hardly inclined to be soft-handed.
The upbringing of children typical at the time was in itself sufficient
to produce authoritarian characters, in Russia as much as in the
rest of the world. The photos of the corpses of landless Ukrainian laborers
hanging from trees, with a cardboard poster featuring the word “Communist”
visibly displayed across their breast, let some of our contemporaries recall
massacres in Jeju (Korea) in 1948, in Indonesia in 1965, in Chile under
Pinochet. Red terror like the reign of terror in the young French republic
was initially, to a large extent, a reaction, and a sympton of fear: the
fear of being defeated and killed, quite mercilessly, by the victors. Authoritarianism
was not only a socio-psychologically engrained feature of many human beings
in the 19th and the first half of the 20th century; it was also a political
response of a revolutionary leadership to a desperate situation of political
and economic chaos, and military encirclement.
In the long run, the characteristic
considerations that informed the policies of the new leadership in Russia
(a country known as Soviet Russia though the soviets or democratic
workers’ councils were either disempowered very early on, or never attained
a decisive political say in the course of the country’s development) were
tied to goals most of which are typical of every ‘power elite.’ To strengthen
and safeguard the state, and to lean on a bureaucracy no less ‘modern’
than that of Imperial Germany, or Britain, or the U.S. (societies that
Max Weber’s studies of growing bureaucratic tendencies tell us a lot about)
was seen as a priority. There certainly existed the necessity to defend
the new state (which, true enough, abolished private property of
industry, big commerce, banks, and the transport sector, and soon also
of farming).
But taking overall control while
factually diempowering the many (as whose steward the party and its leadership
claimed to function) helped pave the way for a statist, in fact state-capitalist
regime of accumulation.
It contributed to setting goals
that in many respects were not much different from those pursued under
Western capitalism. Productivist orientations triumphed. The lives and
the dignity of real human people were sacrificed to an overriding goal:
not maximization of profit harvested by the few (as in the West);
but rapid modernization and expansion of the industrial as well as the
mining sector, and secondly the industrialization of agriculture. Basically,
the American model was to be followed; America was to be “overtaken:” and
if American industry and farming disregarded the ecology, the poor cousins
in Russia, eager to achieve fast growth (which they did achieve) disregarded
the health of workers and the ‘health of mother nature’ even more. The
state truly turned into the modern Leviathan: But, as we know, it did so,
in other, often kindred ways, in the West, where capitalism mutated into
its modern form. A form that also implied a vaster and vaster role of the
state in the economy, albeit for the good of the happy few, the superrich
oligarchy of bankers, industrialists, major shareholders.
So indeed, the outcome of modern
development (or ‘modernization’), in several major or ‘structural’ respects,
was similar, for both ‘systems’.
Summing up, it is possible to
say that in the context of the new ‘socialist’ experiments such modernization
had meant:
- that industrial expansion and
thus accumulation of capital fixe (represented by plants, machinery, the
cost of innovation) received top priority;
- that the needs and lives of
people were subordinated to accumulation, just as they were subordinated
to accumulation in outright capitalist countries;(*)
- that the human and ecological
‘costs’ of accumulation were ignored, just as they have been and still
are largely ignored in modern capitalist societies;(**)
In view of all this it seems
to be quite justified indeed if today people ask whether the experiments
that were meant to lead to socialism or even communism did not turn,
after several phases of error and terror, into no more than merely a second
form (or variety) of modern state capitalism, with traits in many ways
similar to what president Eisenhower had called the “military-industrial
complex” so typical of the U.S. even nowadays.
At the same time, the pseudo-democratic
form (referred to as “people’s democracy”) scarcely hid the openly
monopolistic rule of the ‘few.’ This was causing in the end even more rejection
than the veiled form of factual rule by the few we observe in present-day
Western democracies with their big bureaucracies and dominating ‘elites’
whose legitimacy is said to be guaranteed by elections. Albeit elections
that almost always leave ‘the people’, that is to say, the vast majority
of the factually disempowered electorate as well as most of those who (frequently
because of disillusionment) abstain from voting, in a state of permanent
frustration. People know that, today, their voice is still ignored and
many begin to sense that almost every expression of their needs is subject
to manipulation and falsification,
It is ridiculous, of course,
that the repressive, anti-democratic form of state-capitalism that evolved
in, above all, Eastern Europe and China is labeled communist by both its
ideological defenders and its capitalist attackers in the West. As has
been pointed out, the third watchword of the French revolution of 1789,
égalité, was taken seriously at best in the initial stages
of the Russian revolution. As for China, we have too little information
to say for sure when this lofty ideal was abandoned. And thus an orientation
or goal which also implies compensatory justice and respect for equal socio-economic
rights, thus the right to factual participation of all in social, economic,
and thus political decision-making processes that concern their daily lives.
Perhaps there never existed any
free and egalitarian societies in modern times.
And if we think of ‘communist’
societies, we get an inkling that what was descibed as communist was no
more than “a perversion of an old human dream,” as the U.S. film-maker
Robert Kramer once dryly noted.
Perhaps, in a rudimentary, “undeveloped”
or anticipative form, some pre-modern societies let us recognize elements
of deliberative democracy and of what can be described, in a certain sense,
as a solidaire economy.
Some critics, such as Frederick
Engels, have discovered such seminal or anticipated ‘communism’ or communalism
in certain, by now vanished, Native American social structures.(***)
Other researchers have taken a clue from Engels’ hypothesis and tended
to discover free and equal forms of living together (including a freed,
non-repressive sexuality) in certain other pre-modern social structures;
for instance in Polynesia.
It was not by chance, perhaps,
that in the mid-1860s, a governor of Colorado, advocating genocidal campaigns
against Native Americans (then referred to as “Indians”), spoke of these
“Indians” as “Communists.”
Today, in the Americas South
of the Rio Grande, many Native American communities defend the ejidio,
that is to say, common, shared or communal ownership of land. They instinctively
fear that replacing joint ownership by private property titles is a first
step that will usher in a dynamics that will leave most of them without
any possession of land, in the end. And in fact, in Mexico, the central
government (leaning on a big bureaucratic apparatus) listens to experts
who argue that small landholdings are “not viable” and that the market
“demands” what it brings about anyhow: a process of concentration of land
ownership, and big, “industrialized” farming. Privately owned, by modern
wealthy farmers, by farm management corporations, and by hedgefunds that
rent vast farms to modern tenants. It is a perfect scenario for BAYER as
a maker of pesticides and for MONSANTO as a producer of genetically manipulated
seeds. In many ways, the outcome will be as anti-ecological as the vast
Russian sovchoz and kholchoz farms in the Ukraine and Kazakhstan have been
(and it will imply, of course, for the required work-force, just as alienated
conditions).
As for the pre-modern native
American tribal societies in North America that Engels and Marx were interested
in, is it possible to say that they showed certain traits that are worth
reflecting on today?
In a ‘communist’ Native American
tribal society, personal property existed of course, just as it exists
in our society today and existed in so-called socialist societies in Eastern
Europe.
The procurement of the necessities
of survival of the “nation” (or tribe, as Western sociologists sometimes
prefer to say) was a solidaire affair, undertaken by all. If this presupposes
obviously a common or ‘collective’ effort, even though on a level appropriate
to a pre-industrial society, the same is true in the 19th, 20th and early
21st century: The production and distribution system of the Capitalist
West can function only as a collective, social effort. The same was obviouly
true of the now defunct state-capitalist East.
Can anyone seriously doubt the
“social” or “collective” character of production today? I don’t think so.
Production in the West today is rarely small-scale production by skilled
individuals producing what they or they relatives and neighbors, or the
townspeople immediately need. It is production for anonymous markets. And
on average, mid-sized, large as well as very large work-forces (numbering,
in the case of certain corporations, more than a hundred thousand persons)
are employed. Many if not, in indirect fashion, all activities of such
work-forces of individual corporations are interrelated and interdependent.
In other words, human economic activities are characterized by a common
trait: they forge social bonds between those active and, in many respects,
make isolated, particular (or “private”) actions, on the whole, very unlikely.(****)
This interdepencence and interrelationship
is significant; it constitutes the social character of production.
In other words, production in the West today is no isolated, individual
act even if, from a myopic point of view, it can be experienced as such
an act because the work I do is done very concretely, by me: I sweat, I
get tired, I have to concentrate and avoid mistakes, etc. Still, to give
an example, my work is tied by visible or invisible ties to what
the fellow worker further up or down the assembly line does; and we depend
on parts and components that fellow workers in another plant have produced.
Thus, as actice persons, we participate in what is a common or social or
joint undertaking. And this, due to increased market integration and increasing
specialization processes, in an increasing degree.
But nonetheless, a striking contradiction
exists. There are all of these work processes that we, as factually cooperating
persons, are involved in, in society at large. And we are involved in them
whether we know it or not, as if they were common or shared projects. But
nonetheless we, and with us, the work processes mentioned that we are jointly
engaged in, are just as factually subjected to private control of the few.
That is to say, a joint, social, cooperative undertaking is
nevertheless subjected to the power and control of a very limited number
of owners, managers, major shareholders. And, to a certain degree, also
to the direct or indirect control exercised by political and administrative
‘elites’ that are more or less in close contact with big business and usually
quite ready to respond to most of the ‘wishes’ and the so-called ‘necessities’
big business chooses to dictate, “because there is no alternative.”
In other words, the rationality
of the undertaking, the goal, and the intended outcome of the joint or
shared, or cooperative and collective undertaken are not in free and participative
ways determined by all those actively involved in the undertaking, but
by those who use property titles or political office as a legitimatory
weapon that enables them to exclude and silence the vast majority of the
people. No effective deliberation, no effective participation in decisions
that would significantly affect a privately owned system of socially carried
out production is allowed. No such deliberation involving us, the people,
and no decision-making process that we would participate in freely and
equally and effectively is foreseen, even if only in this way irrational,
ecologically and humanly harmful, profit-driven and thus market-driven
tendencies could be corrected.
In other words, we who are in
fact those citizens who, with respect to their joint activities as economically
active persons, do the decisive work, find ourselves excluded from a real
say in matters that decisively affect the life we live, both inside the
‘enterprise’ or ‘company’ and outside it, both as working people and as
‘familiy people,’ as so-called consumers etc.
It is clear that in those societies
that were once described as the “socialist” East, such exclusion
– though rhetorically and ideologically overcome by the new ‘socialist’
form of property (of the factories, mines, etc., in short, the means of
production) – persisted as well. The old strata in control in the West
– owners, top management, and upper echelons of a bureaucratic state apparatus
at the service of the existing social order – had simply been replaced
by new ‘elites’: political leaders, high-ranking public administrators,
and directors of state-owned ventures. In theory, the new elites had the
‘good of all’ at heart. In practice, the defense and might of the state,
as well as their power were tantamount, and the goal to preserve what they
equated with the survival and advance of the revolution demanded, in their
view, a ‘productivist’ orientation. Above all, permanent expansion, innovation
and modernization of those branches of industry that allowed the ‘new state’
to avoid falling behind in the arms race. Real people, their concrete lives,
their happiness hardly counted. But do they count in the race for profit
that capitalist companies and above all, trans-national corporations, engage
in today?
The way to a freer, more democratic,
more rational – and that means also, less ecologically destructive – social
way of producing and consuming obviously implies very different orientations:
Friendlier, kinder, less harsh, less competitive. And more participative,
in ways that touch all aspects of society, including the economy and its
impact on the ecology.
We need a peaceful turn-about,
finally. A solidaire, ecologically sane economy. A participative economy.
A participative, much more democratic and inclusive democracy. New and
friendly global economic cooperation: based on mutual help, on free and
fair exchange that must replace competition, a quest for profit and for
the conquest of markets. And ABOVE ALL we need, on a global scale, compensatory
justice: and this means real actions, on the part of the so-called First
World that will attempt to heal the wounds left by colonialism, neo-colonialism,
and by all the economic and military (non-camouflaged as well as clandestine)
forms of war that still persist today.
The necessity of change cannot
be denied anymore, once we open our eyes.
NOTES
(*) Apparently, due to ‘emergencies’
and the ‘militarization of labor’ in the early phase, due to Stalin’s terror
later on, the concrete form could be more brutal in Russia; on the other
hand, there were also cases of idealistic sacrifice for a goal many people
believed in.
(**) In certain phases of accumulation during
the time of the Russian experiment that lasted from 1918 to the early 1990s,
the extent to which the human and ecological ‘costs’ of accumulation were
ignored was even more enormous. In certain heavily industrialized regions,
in many mining districts and areas characterized by strong dependence on
oil exploration and production, it could attain and surpass the very tangible
levels witnessed under 19th and early 20th century capitalism in the West.
Or under capitalism in the ‘emerging’ industrial countries of the so-called
Third World today.
(***) The concept of ‘primitive’ or primordial
‘communism’ is outlined in simple terms by Alexandra Kollontai: “Unter
dem Urkommunismus […] [war] das Privateigentum unbekannt [...]
Die Menschen ernaehrten sich von dem, was die Jagd und das Sammeln von
wildwachsenden Kraeutern und Fruechten ihnen gaben. [...] [Im] Stadium
der Jaeger und Sammler [...] existierten weder Abhaengigkeit der Frau vom
Mann noch etwa unterschiedliche Rechte. [...] Der Stamm fasste Beschluesse
und bestimmte. [...] Gleichheit und natuerliche Solidaritaet [...] [waren
die] den Stamm zusammenhaltenden Kraefte. [...] Darum [...] war es
in der ersten Periode der oekonomischen Entwicklung der Menschheit unmoeglich,
dass ein Stammesmitglied einem anderen untergeordnet oder von diesem einseitig
abhaengig war.“ - Alexandra Kollontai, Die Situation der Frau in der gesellschaftlichen
Entwicklung. Vierzehn Vorlesungen vor Arbeiterinnen und Baeuerinnen an
der Sverdlov-Universitaet 1921. [Frankfurt] (Verlag Neue Kritik) 1975,
p.15f.
(****) The contradiction between societal processes
or activities and private, particular gain of the few derived from them
was highlighted by Estes Kefauver. He pointed out that, “[i]n cases where
a technology takes years to perfect, with the accretion of knowledge supplied
by a multitude of research workers, the patent reward often goes to the
perfector of the final stage of the discovery.” And “[w]here an important
invention is the product of a number of minds working in different research
laboratories, too often the reward […] goes to the individual or corporation
most alert in the acquisitive arts.” “Private privilege […] tends
to dig in and broaden its base […]” - Estes Kefauver, In A Few Hands. Monopoly
Power in America. Harmondsworth (Pelican) 1966, p.250.
What is here clarified with regard to the
particular fields of scientific research and technological innovation,
holds true with regard to the aggregate processes of production of goods,
knowledge etc.: Collective effort, the contribution of all of society is
at stake, but under our present conditions, the fruit of such effort is
overwhelmingly placed “in a few hands” – those of big corporations active
in industry, finance, commerce plus the property sector and of the members
of a plutocratic stratum which function as important owners or shareholders.
Check...:http://www.democracynow.org/2011/2/17/democracy_uprising_in_the_usa_noam
Check: http://www.democracynow.org/2011/2/17/democracy_uprising_in_the_usa_noam
go back to
URBAN DEMOCRACY issue #
7
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LINKS
U.S. SITES
Occupy Wall Street
www.occupywallstreet.us
www.occupyyoutube.com
http://occupyyoutube.blogspot.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/OccupyYoutube
We Are Change
http://www.WeAreChange.org
Chomskyon
decentralized solidarity movements
Noam Chomskyon
Occupy Wall Street protests
Z Communications AND Z mag
http://www.zcommunications.org/
M.Albert/Wilpert,
"The State
of the U.S. Left", in: Z Communications
(backup copy)
Michael
Albert,
Occupy Wall Street Entreaty &
Spanish Anarchists Interview
(Z Communications, Sept.2011)
[backup copy]
Left Forum
www.leftforum.org
Local to global.org
www.localtoglobal.org
Nathan
Schneider, "From Occupy
Wall Street to Occupy Everywhere"
(The Nation, Oct. 31, 2011)
backup-copy
Deutschsprachige Web-Seiten
GERMAN LANGUAGE SITES
K21
(Stuttgart)
backup
copy
"people
of the world, rise up"
Aufruf von K21 zur Demo am 15.Okt.
(backup copy)
Echte Demokratie jetzt
Echte Demokratie jetzt
Aufruf zur Demo
am 15. Okt.
backup
copy
linksunten.indymedia.org
backup
copy
Attac
Attac Deutschland
attac Aufruf
zur Demo am 15.Okt.2011
backup
copy
Occupy Frankfurt
http://www.occupyfrankfurt.de/
doku.php
backup
copy
https://www.facebook.com/
OccupyFfM
backup
copy
15 October Net
http://15october.net/de/
Aufruf
(backup copy)
Buendnis 90 / Die Gruenen
Die Gruenen [Green Party, Germany]
zur
Demo am 15.Okt
backup
copy
Die Linke (Left Party, Germany)
DIE LINKE unterstuetzt die weltweiten Proteste
gegen die Diktatur der Finanzmaerkte und fuer mehr Demokratie
backup
copy
Realdemokratie
www.realdemokratie.de
We Are Change Austria
www.wearechangeaustria.yooco.de
http:/www.wearechangeaustria.
blogspot.com
http:/www.wearechangeaustria.
wordpress.com
We Are Change - CH
wearechange.ch.jovinus-meta.net
SPANISH SITES
AND INFORMATION
IN ENGLISH (ON SPAIN)
Democracy real YA!
http://www.democraciarealya.es
Manifesto of
Democracia real YA!
backup
copy
Inés Benítez,
"Spain:
'Indignant' Protests Heat Up Election Campaign"
(IPS news net, Oct.4,2011)
backup
copy
Tito Drago,"'Indignant'
Demonstrators Marching to
Brussels to Protest Effects
of Crisis" (IPS news net, July 30, 2011)
backup
copy
Tito
Drago, "Spain: Streets Paved
with Evicted Families" (IPS, Oct.7, 2011)
backup
copy
CHILE
Students in Chile are protesting against
the privatization of higher education that took place
under Pinochet, and against the underfinanced
public education system
(xinhua
net, Oct.20, 2011)
backup
copy
international
SITES
Support Julian Assange
www.support-julian-assange.com
Forum Social Mundial
www.forumsocialmundial.org
Z Communications AND Z mag
http://www.zcommunications.org/
www.anticapitalistas.org
Retos anticapitalistas
backup
copy
We Are Change
http://www.WeAreChange.org
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