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Drawing a line
Can Adbusters change the way we think about economics?

12A

ILLUSTRATION IST-ONE

Images from the Lasn and Adbusters book Meme Wars: I want to light a re under students around the world, he says

ast November, 70 Harvard economics students walked out of a lecture by their faculty head, Greg Mankiw. Angry at the conservative nature of Harvards economics course, they were suspicious of their lecturers failure to predict the ongoing nancial crisis, and their unerring faith in the theories that led to the crisis in the rst place. So up stood the students, and out they went to join a march organised by Occupy Boston instead. Its this kind of campus reaction that Kalle Lasn wants to inspire with his latest book, Meme Wars the Creative Destruction of Neo-Classical Economics. I want to light a re under the economic students around the world, he says. I can imagine a few of them asking: how come we are still being taught the old economics? Why did not even one in a hundred of you professors see the meltdown coming? Its an invitation to the students who get wind of the book to create a bit of a ruckus within the university. Lasn is the founder and editor of Adbusters, the very leftwing, very well-designed magazine that has railed against consumerism since 1989. Among other successful stunts, Adbusters has popularised TV Turno Week where, as you would expect, millions try to avoid television for seven days. Then theres the annual Buy Nothing Day, which is again fairly self-explanatory. Both campaigns go hand in hand with what Adbusters is most famous for: culture-jamming, or subvertising, which sees the magazines team create spoof versions of well-known adverts. Its also the organ that invented the concept of Occupy Wall Street, and Lasn is

The new style rebels

Adbusters magazine has been visually subverting capitalism for 20 years. Here its founder Kalle Lasn outlines his new economic manifesto to Patrick Kingsley

the man who rst registered the movements website. Like anyone involved in Occupy, Lasn doesnt want to be identied as its gurehead or posterboy. He is proud of the movements horizontal structure, and has been running from the authoritarian left since he was a child. Born in Tallinn in 1942, his family ed the Russian invasion two years later. For the next half-decade, he lived in a German refugee camp, before spending the next

two decades in Australia and Japan. Lasn made it to Canada in 1970, where he now lives on a small farm outside Vancouver, apparently padding to work in wellington boots. Before founding Adbusters, he made TV documentaries that critiqued capitalism. Yet he denes himself against consumerism, rather than with the old-school left. For the past 15 to 20 years, we at Adbusters have been saying we have to jump over the dead body of the old left, he says. Im not all that interested in the political left, unless its this new horizontal left thats coming out of Occupy. But Meme Wars is not, he stresses, a manifesto for Occupy, a movement often criticised for its lack of direction. It is nevertheless an attempt to do what Occupy couldnt: its a radical economics textbook that Lasn hopes will spread the spirit of Occupy from the town square to the university campus. It was of the things that the Occupy movement didnt quite achieve, unlike in 1968 the great moment in my life, when I became politicised, he says. For some weird reason, when almost the same thing [as 1968] happened in Zuccotti Park, and then spread around the world like it did in 68, it didnt really happen in the universities. The book is billed as an alternative textbook, and it certainly looks it.

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Meme Wars is billed as an alternative textbook, but its pages are a far cry from the usual economics primers

Adbusters pastiches adverts to satirise consumerism and Meme Wars does something similar for economics primers. Darling! reads a subverted image of two 50s lovers. Lets get deeply into debt. Elsewhere, graphs that chart economic growth over the past halfcentury are overlayed with ones that show a simultaneous rise in depression and pollution. While the texts content is pretty dense, visually it has the look and feel of a messy scrapbook or graphic

novel. There arent even any page numbers: a rejection of what Lasn sees as the faux-rationalism of mainstream economics. Thats deliberate. We dont like page numbers. Its one of the leftcortex things that you dont actually need if you want to understand something such as economics. Lasn sees three problems with conventional economics teaching. First: orthodox or neo-classical economics has brought the world to the brink of

nancial ruin. Second: by fostering a consumer culture, it has turned humanity into a selsh, anxious race. Third: it fetishises economic growth even though this growth is ultimately destructive, since it both makes us unhappy and wreaks unsustainable havoc on the planets natural resources. This is one of the most fatal aws in neo-classical economics, says Lasn, in a delicate Estonian lilt that belies the passion of his argument. We

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Lasn and his Adbusters team take aim at corporations, capitalism and consumerism

cannot keep on selling o our natural capital and calling it income. Its the most stupid mistake of all When they measure growth, they dont measure real progress. The they to which he refers is the economics establishment. People such as Harvards Greg Mankiw, whose textbook, Principles of Economics, is taught in many universities, and which Lasn argues helps entrench the values of orthodox economics in the minds of each successive generation of economists, who then use their inuence to maintain the status quo inside governments. Lasns modest hope is therefore to inspire the next generation to grab Mankiw and his brethren by the scru of their neck and throw them out of power. In a sense, I am calling for a scientic revolution: a revolution where the new guard the heterodox, maverick people who have been sniping for a long time rise to the top and nally create a new kind of economics. Once that happens, Lasn argues, a new crop of economists will emerge and theyll become economic advisers to the people running governments all around the world, and bit by bit the whole practice of economics can begin to heave. As Lasn himself acknowledges, his hopes are not new. In fact, Meme Wars is structured around the thoughts of leftwing economists who have been

making these arguments for years. The book features interviews with Joseph Stiglitz, and essays by, among others, Herman Daly and George Akerlof. We, says Lasn of his colleagues at Adbusters, who helped him edit the book, took all these people who we had fallen in love with over the years, and we put together a jigsaw puzzle of them. Meme Wars takes those existing radical arguments and uses them to esh out what Lasn sees as a new(ish) brand of radical economics. Something that is humbler than the orthodox schools that doesnt hubristically see itself as an exact, rational science, but a

social one. Lasn suggests the concept of psychonomics economics that takes into account human behaviour or bionomics, which bears in mind the cost of environment damage. There has been a maverick tradition out there that has been snapping at the heels of the dominant paradigm for a long time, he argues. But they havent quite zeroed in on exactly what [the alternative] could be. 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 to do something that actually could put humanity on a new path. Of course, it probably isnt quite as revolutionary as all that. Behavioural and no-growth economics already exist as concepts. Tim Jacksons Prosperity Beyond Growth and Ha-Joon Changs 23 Things They Dont Tell You About Capitalism are just two recent books that also contradict traditional economic ideas. But Meme Wars with its unusual visuals and collation of todays main radical thinkers is nevertheless a welcome addition to the fray. And if its unique graphics can turn a few more heads than its predecessors on campus, then so much the better.
Meme Wars: the Creative Destruction of NeoClassical Economics, by Kalle Lasn/Adbusters, is published by Penguin, 19.99.

8 The Guardian 06.11.12

Meme Wars is an attempt to do something that could put humanity on a new path, says Lasn

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