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

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

On 30.12.18 13:53, Keith Hart wrote:
> But -- there has to be a but -- I believe that there is one crippling
> intellectual impediment above all others that undermines political
> initiatives generated in this network. It is the belief that more
> solidarity can fix excessive individualism.
> 
> When I grew up in Manchester after the war, solidarity was a powerful
> weapon against privacy, the cult of being exclusive.

That was, I hope, not my point, and whatever element of collectivity
informs a humane reaction to climate change, will have to look every
different from the collectivity that was produced by the experience of
industrial work. We live in an "information society" hence each element,
including each human being, can be (and often is) defined more
extensively, and more varied ways than in an industrial context.

Hence, while identity politics, in practice, often create dead ends,
producing multually exclusive niches, very well-served by social media
that specialize in niche-marketing, the answer cannot be, in my view, a
return of simple collective. Rather, is has to lie in finding ways of
create resonance across the different niches, to articulate ways to
create an understanding of a shared fate on some levels while continuing
to articulate multiplicity on others.

I also don't want to revive the old individual-vs-society debate that
haunted 20th century sociology, rather I think we have moved beyond this
and can now start from a relatively well-establised ecological
perspective that highlights how agent(s) and environment(s) are
co-producing each other.

But, for now, this all remains too abstract, not tied into a idea of
collective agency. But it is not unthinkeable to combine a socially
liberal idea of the self with a strong collective idea of public
investment into the transformation of the energy sources of society.

This can be done on all levels, local, regional, national. And it
actully happens in bits and pieces in a lot of places and contexts. What
is lacking in the imaginery that ties together differnet elements, that
produces clear flautlines to isolate and combate those who fight this
transformation.

This, I think, is eminently doable, but opens up a new rift. In the same
way that neo-liberalism opened a conflict between economic globalization
and the global justice movement, this could open the rift between
authoritarian geoingeering and democratic green economy. We are not
their yet, not by far.








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