Re: <nettime> Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

On 27.12.18 20:11, Brian Holmes wrote:
> So what's to be done is to generate new aspirations, new ideas of the
> good life, and initial models for putting them into practice at local or
> regional scale. Please notice, I am NOT talking about individual models
> - because as much good as that can do is already being done. Instead
> it's about imagining a transformed government, and a new, more intricate
> relation between state and civil society. Inequality will be a big
> driver for this, especially as AI starts kicking in and more and more
> people lose their jobs, or never succeed in getting one. Flood control,
> drought response and the relocation of populations will require major
> collective investments - and here, collective means some level of what
> is called the state. Anthropocene Socialism will emerge pragmatically,
> as an increasingly mixed economy, with the state handling problems on a
> scale that no individual or corporation can address, from medical care
> to clean energy provision to river management, and let's not forget the
> geoengineering, because it will be needed at planetary scale. 


There are multiple challenges nestled into one another, and there cannot
be a single answer to them. So there are many, and we see them being
formulated all around us -- from platform coops, to fair trade,
non-corporate information systems, decentralized renewable energy, local
currencies, and the revival of non-western ecological thinking, to name
but a few.

However, what is missing are points of connection, translations,
transformation and bridging where one particular local/cultural response
to the challenges can be made useful for other ones, somewhere else, and
according to a different cultural logic. These kind of bridges from one
closed network to another are more urgent than ever, not the least to
overcome the the cellular character of machine-mediated communication,
as Morlock called it a couple of weeks ago.

But to break out of the mold of neoliberal hyper-individuality and the
cult of "weak ties", to formulate something like a left perspective,
there needs to be a realization of a common fate, of a problem that
cannot be solved individually, but demands a collective response. From
this, a practice of solidarity can be built.

In the industrial society, the common fate (of the working class) was a
experience of exploitation in the work place. For a long time, I thought
"climate change", the destruction of the ground on which civilization is
built, could provide that for the 21st century. But so far, this hasn't
happened, and I think it will not, because even while sweating through
yet another heat wave, or fleeing from yet another 1-in-100-year
hurricane, the issue remains too abstract, too far removed from social
agency. And as long as this is the case, the climate change denialists
will win, because they at least offer the comfort of ignorance, rather
acknowledging a problems but offering no solution (which is politically
the worst approach).

I now think the mistake was to think that a common problem would provide
enough impetus for solidarity, while more likely it is the proposed
collective solution to this problem, that can inspire solidarity. So, in
terms of industrial society, not the experience of exploitation but
practice of unionization was the key (though, lets not forget, also
fascism promised an solution to exploitation (at least of the indigenous
working class)).

From this, we can think of a political map consisting of four groups.

One (I) being the denialists who want to continue their very profitable
lines of business no matter there are rising costs of externalities,
precisely because they treat these as externalities: costs paid by
others. I think in terms of institutional power, this group is the
majority, but in terms of number of people, this is a minority.

The second group (II) knows -- explicitly or intuitively -- that
something needs to be done, that industrial civilization is reaching its
end point, one way or the other. But they don't know what to do so they
do nothing, creating all kinds cognitive stresses to which xenophobes
and racists offer relief. This, in terms of number of people, is the
majority.

The other two groups know that something needs to be done, and are
actively doing something. They share a lot of things, but what separates
them is whether they see climate change as broad social justice issue
(III), even if they have trouble formulating it, and those who see it as
a specialized issue that needs to be addressed without major
modification of the political economy (IV). I personally think this is
impossible and that the later group will drift into authoritarianism as
a way to address issues that our current political institutions are not
capable of addressing (e.g. which city to save and which is abandon,
Miami or New Orleans?).

The first phase of the political fight is about group I against group
III and IV. At the moment, group I is winning because it is capable of
drawing group II on its side. But that can be changed politically with
the formulation of a green new deal, not the least because there can be
tactical alliances between group III and IV around this issue (at least
in the rich countries with the necessary scientific/productive capacities).

But how this alliance is structured is prefiguring the fight between
group III and IV, which will be major fault line within a possible green
techno-economic paradigm.

And here, the structure of our communication technologies will play a
crucial role, whether they support or suppress the ability to move
outside very narrow circles, to translate ideas and practices from one
cell to another, allowing for the necessary diversity while preserving a
resonance between them.











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