The economic system is incompatible with the survival of life on Earth. It is time to design a new one.

By George Monbiot / theguardian.com

For most of my adult life I’ve railed against “corporate capitalism”, “consumer capitalism” and “crony capitalism”. It took me a long time to see that the problem is not the adjective but the noun.

While some people have rejected capitalism gladly and swiftly, I’ve done so slowly and reluctantly.

Part of the reason was that I could see no clear alternative: unlike some anti-capitalists, I have never been an enthusiast for state communism.

I was also inhibited by its religious status. To say “capitalism is failing” in the 21st century is like saying “God is dead” in the 19th: it is secular blasphemy. It requires a degree of self-confidence I did not possess.

But as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to recognise two things. First, that it is the system, rather than any variant of the system, that drives us inexorably towards disaster. Second, that you do not have to produce a definitive alternative to say that capitalism is failing. The statement stands in its own right. But it also demands another, and different, effort to develop a new system.

Capitalism’s failures arise from two of its defining elements. The first is perpetual growth. Economic growth is the aggregate effect of the quest to accumulate capital and extract profit. Capitalism collapses without growth, yet perpetual growth on a finite planet leads inexorably to environmental calamity.

Those who defend capitalism argue that, as consumption switches from goods to services, economic growth can be decoupled from the use of material resources. Last week a paper in the journal New Political Economy, by Jason Hickel and Giorgos Kallis, examined this premise. They found that while some relative decoupling took place in the 20th century (material resource consumption grew, but not as quickly as economic growth), in the 21st century there has been a recoupling: rising resource consumption has so far matched or exceeded the rate of economic growth. The absolute decoupling needed to avert environmental catastrophe (a reduction in material resource use) has never been achieved, and appears impossible while economic growth continues. Green growth is an illusion.

A system based on perpetual growth cannot function without peripheries and externalities. There must always be an extraction zone – from which materials are taken without full payment – and a disposal zone, where costs are dumped in the form of waste and pollution. As the scale of economic activity increases until capitalism affects everything, from the atmosphere to the deep ocean floor, the entire planet becomes a sacrifice zone: we all inhabit the periphery of the profit-making machine.

This drives us towards cataclysm on such a scale that most people have no means of imagining it. The threatened collapse of our life-support systems is bigger by far than war, famine, pestilence or economic crisis, though it is likely to incorporate all four. Societies can recover from these apocalyptic events, but not from the loss of soil, an abundant biosphere and a habitable climate.

The second defining element is the bizarre assumption that a person is entitled to as great a share of the world’s natural wealth as their money can buy. This seizure of common goods causes three further dislocations. First, the scramble for exclusive control of non-reproducible assets, which implies either violence or legislative truncations of other people’s rights. Second, the immiseration of other people by an economy based on looting across both space and time. Third, the translation of economic power into political power, as control over essential resources leads to control over the social relations that surround them.

In the New York Times on Sunday, the Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz sought to distinguish between good capitalism, which he called “wealth creation”, and bad capitalism, which he called “wealth grabbing” (extracting rent). I understand his distinction. But from the environmental point of view, wealth creation is wealth grabbing. Economic growth, intrinsically linked to the increasing use of material resources, means seizing natural wealth from both living systems and future generations.

To point to such problems is to invite a barrage of accusations, many of which are based on this premise: capitalism has rescued hundreds of millions of people from poverty – now you want to impoverish them again. It is true that capitalism, and the economic growth it drives, has radically improved the prosperity of vast numbers of people, while simultaneously destroying the prosperity of many others: those whose land, labour and resources were seized to fuel growth elsewhere. Much of the wealth of the rich nations was – and is – built on slavery and colonial expropriation.

Like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now causes more harm than good. Just as we have found means of generating useful energy that are better and less damaging than coal, so we need to find means of generating human wellbeing that are better and less damaging than capitalism.

There is no going back: the alternative to capitalism is neither feudalism nor state communism.

Soviet communism had more in common with capitalism than the advocates of either system would care to admit.

Both systems are (or were) obsessed with generating economic growth. Both are willing to inflict astonishing levels of harm in pursuit of this and other ends. Both promised a future in which we would need to work for only a few hours a week, but instead demand endless, brutal labour. Both are dehumanising. Both are absolutist, insisting that theirs and theirs alone is the one true God.

So what does a better system look like? I don’t have a complete answer, and I don’t believe any one person does. But I think I see a rough framework emerging.

Part of it is provided by the ecological civilisation proposed by Jeremy Lent, one of the greatest thinkers of our age. Other elements come from Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics and the environmental thinking of Naomi Klein, Amitav Ghosh, Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq, Raj Patel and Bill McKibben.

Part of the answer lies in the notion of “private sufficiency, public luxury”. Another part arises from the creation of a new conception of justice based on this simple principle: every generation, everywhere, shall have an equal right to the enjoyment of natural wealth.

I believe our task is to identify the best proposals from many different thinkers and shape them into a coherent alternative. Because no economic system is only an economic system but intrudes into every aspect of our lives, we need many minds from various disciplines – economic, environmental, political, cultural, social and logistical – working collaboratively to create a better way of organising ourselves that meets our needs without destroying our home.

Our choice comes down to this. Do we stop life to allow capitalism to continue, or stop capitalism to allow life to continue?

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

The post Dare to Declare Capitalism Dead – Before It Takes Us All Down With It appeared first on Void Network.

I think we can simplify these questions in a way that may provide some perspective.

Which future would you rather face?

Having to spend between one and ten years in prison

OR

not going to prison, but living in a world in which:

• you and most people you know will, by the age of 50, probably get cancer, heart disease, diabetes, an auto-immune disorder, or a painful chronic illness that no one understands (with all the suffering and likelihood of death that accompany those conditions)
• you, your immediate family, and your closest friends will have a roughly 10% – 50% chance of experiencing a high death toll extreme weather event or acute famine, and possibly dying in it
• if you have family and loved ones from outside Europe/Australia and North America, they will probably face a 50-99% chance of having to face lethal weather events and famines multiple times, killing many of them
• any natural area that you have ever loved will be forever altered by mass extinction, mining, drought, or other causes
• you would have to sit by and watch as the political institutions, financial institutions, and corporations most responsible for all this suffering gain ever more power over your life and your surroundings, never being abolished, never being held accountable in any meaningful way.

Now let’s assume that the bad things described above—relating to death, disease, extreme weather, mass extinctions—are going to happen no matter what. In fact, yes: let’s assume that. We’re not speaking hypothetically right now. This is a realistic assumption. All the scientific models that have been validated and refined over the last decades predict that we are on a collision course for that level of suffering and death, or worse. In the parts of the world that are on the cutting edge of the apocalypse, those conditions already pertain.

So now let’s come back to our hypothetical scenario. First, the scenario’s realistic foundation:

Every year for the foreseeable future brings with it the grim certainty of skyrocketing death rates, disease, famine, mass extinction, loss of habitat, and the disappearance of entire ecosystems.

Now, the choice. Would you rather:

• face all this harm and suffering, within the approximate probabilities named in the first bulleted section, but also
• take illegal actions against the structures and institutions responsible for all this suffering, and by doing so assume a less than 50% risk of one to ten years in prison
• know that with all the other people also taking forceful action, ecocide and genocide become less profitable, and those in power lose some or all their power, whereas the rest of us, as well as the generations to come, gain a partial or complete ability to organize our communities and tend to our ecosystems in a way that prioritizes healing

OR

take no action other than symbolic protest, avoid the risk of prison, but also do nothing to diminish the power of the world eaters. With nothing to hold them back, the apocalypse becomes even more brutal, and the future you face includes:

• hundreds of millions of humans dying every year from famine, lack of clean water, pollution, extreme weather events, and genocidal warfare resulting from these scarcities occurring within a competitive politico-economical framework
• you and everyone you know facing a significant decrease in life expectancy, as the entire human population decreases between 10%-80%
• the likelihood that you and the people you care about the most have to survive or are excruciatingly killed off by famine, cancer, diarrhea, tropical diseases, heart disease, untreated infection, wildfires, floods, or warfare
• having to obey the increasingly dictatorial authority of the political and economic institutions that are directly responsible for all this suffering, or even worse dictatorships that arise as society falls apart but people just watch it all passively

In the above scenarios, which offer simplified but accurate versions of the hidden choices we all face every day, what does the risk of prison have to do with the apocalypse and how extreme it gets?

Actually, everything. To understand why, there’s some official history that needs to be refuted.

When we learn the standard history of civilization, revolutions are never mentioned until the Age of Reason and the supposedly reasonable revolutions of slave owners, colonizers, military officers, and businessmen in France and North America. Prior to that, we may hear of quite a few earlier civilizations that mysteriously collapsed. Or, we may get spoon fed a tale of continuity from Mesopotamia through Egypt to Rome and the Holy Roman Empire and Spain and then modernity, with everything beyond the shadow of the State (or in the latter version, beyond the shadow of so-called Western states) completely ignored.

In the years I was doing the research for my book, Worshiping Power: An Anarchist View of Early State Formation, I could not find a single example of a statist society that collapsed, that just fell apart from some logistical inefficiency, spiraling warfare, or local ecocide perpetrated by the ruling class. I did come across multiple “mysterious” collapses that were quite clearly caused or at least helped along by lower class revolutions, and after these revolutions people’s quality of life usually improved. As for the other collapses that do remain mysterious, in every case I came across evidence—inconclusive but nonetheless strong—that popular uprisings combined with massive abandonment (back in the day when there was a frontier beyond which State power did not reach) helped tip the balance of power. Yet the vast majority of academic sources I plowed through—historians, archaeologists, paleoecologists, and anthropologists from fifty different decades, twenty different countries, and a dozen different schools of thought—refused to even mention the concept of revolution or to portray the lower classes as a group capable of agency or even thought.

So: revolution. It’s been with us as a possibility as long as the State has. Accordingly, in our present scenario, I am talking about us rising up against the power structures responsible for ecocide and genocide, and taking effective action against the institutions and infrastructures that cause us the most harm.

The question of the law, obviously, is a joke. The law is a weapon in the hands of the ruling class. They only follow it or deploy it when it suits their interests. And if we take effective action against them, they will try to punish us regardless of whether our actions are technically illegal.

So I’m not strictly talking about taking illegal action: I’m talking about saving ourselves from immense harm, which most people would consider an ethically valid basis for action.

For now, let’s leave aside the ethical question of, how many people complicit in mass murder is it okay to kill, provided they are still engaged in mass murder and we’re not punishing them for harms that are no longer ongoing. (I might pick that question up in a future newsletter.)

At the moment let’s just imagine the destruction of things that have no feelings and no existence outside of their status as tools for extraction, domination, and despoliation: pipelines, mines, highways, airports, prisons, mansions, drilling installations, facilities related to the police and military, cash crop and monocrop operations, golf courses, grass lawns, cell phone towers, useless-shit factories, chemical and automobile and weapons manufacturers… the list goes on and on.

We know from past experiences that sabotage campaigns are exponentially more likely than protest to lead to the cancellation of new oppressive infrastructures being built. Sabotage campaigns together with protests are even more effective, especially if those protests focus on blockades and the total rejection of those in power rather than the overtures to dialogue. Regardless, protests, blockades, and sabotage all put us at risk of arrest and imprisonment.

About that risk though. I tossed out the figure of a 50% chance of going to prison. That was intentional, because I think if we are going to take big risks for a revolution, it is much healthier and more sustainable if we face up to those risks and assume the worst will come to pass. If we can imagine ourselves dealing with the consequences and surviving, prison and the police will already have lost most of their power over us. But realistically, the actual risk is closer to, and probably below, 1%, if we follow some basic security practices. Significantly, the actions that may feel the safest if we are inculcated in all the delusions of a liberal democracy, are actually the riskiest.

This has certainly been true for me. In my life, I have been arrested four times. Those four arrests earned me (in order)

• six months locked up in county jails, maximum security prison, and minimum security prison, where I faced various forms of violence from guards and snitches;
• a weekend in a temporary detention facility in conditions that technically qualified as toxic;
• a week in jail, a deportation process lasting two years in which I had to remain in the country and check in at court every two weeks but was not legally allowed to work, and the whole time I was under the threat of a permanent ban, which would mean never being allowed to return and see loved ones;
• and a quick night in jail, respectively.

The first three arrests—the ones with the worst consequences—were for some of the most peaceful actions I have ever participated in. The first was civil disobedience, the second was a legal protest (in fact it was the mass arrest that was illegal, and if I’d had the patience to follow up with some noncommunicative lawyers I would have gotten a huge payout a few years later, in part for the illegal arrest and in part for the toxic site where the holding pens had been set up). And the third was also a legal protest, though it took two years on provisional release and a court case to prove it (there was, um… some disagreement about what constituted “public disorder” and what constituted an “explosive” in the eyes of the law, and it took a good lawyer and favorable witnesses to win that dispute).

The fourth one actually was an illegal protest in which a number of neo-Nazis and cops got assaulted and even injured, and some property got smashed. My friend and I weren’t assuming any additional risks aside from going with the flow, but going with the flow is its own risk, and we didn’t hightail it out of there fast enough when the signs made it clear that that was the move. However, police couldn’t pin anything on any of the people who got cornered and mass arrested. It was too difficult for them to gather specific evidence, because of the chaos factor, because people weren’t civil, because of all the movement and pandemonium plus a modest amount of destruction. Of course, police don’t needevidence to lock people up in prison, but in a democracy they do need to calculate how much they can stray into the legal terrain of the state of exception. In this case, it would have been harder for the pigs to sell since there wasn’t enough disruption for the media to create a major political scandal or mobilize fragile bourgeois sensibilities enough to justify locking up anyone who had anything to do with the protest. So they let us all go.

Now let’s talk about all the things that aren’t showing up here, all the risks that never resulted in arrests. Or, more appropriately, let’s talk around them. There is an unavoidable inequality between civil disobedience, on the one hand, and on the other the continuum of sabotage, collective self-defense, counterattack, and insurrectionary action. The State will go to far greater lengths to repress or eliminate those they suspect of carrying out forceful actions, and also those who vocalize their support for such actions and the revolutionary culture they belong to.

What’s more, the State proactively organizes society to preempt the capacities we need in order to struggle wisely, like the ability to tell stories and create collective memory. We are shaped as isolated individuals dependent on the dominant institutions for any sense of history. More often than not, they just spoon feed us entertainment to fill the hole where our sense of history should be. And as we know, repression skews sharply in favor of nonviolence: it is far riskier to tell the stories of sabotage, of insurrection, of combat. I won’t be sharing any such stories in this newsletter. Immediately, I can hear in my own head the cynical insinuation that I’m probably just some hypocrite who only writes about this stuff. Which is okay. We need to learn to deal with far worse forms of baiting and harassment.

The most important thing is on the one hand not to respond from a place of ego, not to worry about curating a reputation for being a daring revolutionary, and on the other hand to pay close attention to anyone who mocks or belittles others in a way that would encourage a culture of people having to show off or insinuate their illegalist credentials. And always remember the maxim: you don’t have to be a cop to do a cop’s work. (Don’t spread rumors about people you suspect of being infiltrators or snitches: the cops themselves benefit from rumorology and often spread false accusations against others; instead, share constructive criticism of harmful forms of communication and conflict/avoidance.)

Stepping back from our individual egos and sinking into our collective body, what any one of us can attest to is that there have been tens of thousands of banks and cop shops smashed or burned, pigs and fascists beaten up, government buildings attacked, pipelines and mines sabotaged, construction and clearcutting equipment destroyed, research facilities torched, labs liberated, secrets leaked, useful or valuable goods stolen, and frauds committed, and those who have done prison sentences can best be counted in the hundreds,1 with many of those being people who got framed but didn’t actually do anything.

In other words, we are often the safest when we play it dangerous, as long as we are careful, as long as we use precautions or make smart interventions during chaotic moments, as long as we discourage a culture of bravado, self-isolation, rumor-spreading, or snitching.

And to zoom out for a moment, no one on this planet is safe until we can nourish an ethos of collective self-defense against the institutions that are threatening and harming us, smashing their gears so they cannot function anymore. What use is it to speak of survival if we have no practice of fighting back against those who are killing us? There is room for all of us, but we need to figure out what we can contribute and what it is we still need to learn in order to be a vital part of the webs of solidarity and mutual aid.

Thanks for reading Surviving Leviathan with Peter Gelderloos! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

A revolution is not comprised of tactics alone. If we let ourselves get turned around by impatience, desperation, avoidance of criticism, loss of historical memory, if we divorce our strategies from our goals, our visions, and our ethics, we quickly become our own worst enemies. Nonetheless, it doesn’t hurt to proliferate certain tactics, to imagine what a better place we would be in if people realized it’s well worth the risk to attack the infrastructures that are spewing out death, poisoning our futures and our present. What a better place we would be in if people responded to our learned helplessness, to this hegemonic hopelessness, with a thought, a certainty: how many miles there are of unprotected power grids and pipelines! How many bulldozers, construction sites, and offices of evil institutions have no more protection at night than a camera that will log nothing more than a time and a masked figure, unidentifiable! How many of us there are, and how hard we are to surveil when we leave our snitches at home, when we don’t take our phones and other tracking devices out of the house with us!

How powerful, when we realize that we are powerful. How frightful, when we remember that we can be vengeful. How grounded, when we learn to integrate our need to fight and to heal. How inspiring, when we understand that all the walls and cages and cameras and militarized police forces of this whole prison society are there to protect the powerful… from us.

Sooner or later, the odds will flip, and our probabilities for health and survival will begin a slow ascent, and the odds on the plutocrats and police will face a sudden plummet. That moment? Collectively, we decide when it arrives.

1

The approximation—tens of thousands of actions, hundreds of imprisoned—is based on, roughly, the last ten years in the half dozen countries I’m most familiar with.

_____

SOURCE: https://petergelderloos.substack.com/p/ethics-risk-apocalypse

The post Ethics, Risk, Apocalypse- Peter Gelderloos appeared first on Void Network.

In this context, we sat down with long-time anarchist author and organizer Peter Gelderloos, to talk about the present moment, the path ahead for autonomous movements, and the harsh realities in front of us.

IGD: You address climate change in your book, The Solutions Are Already Here, what do you make of the current moment that we are in?

Peter Gelderloos: I think we are in a very critical moment where mainstream voices are identifying a tipping point in relation to recent and recurring extreme weather events, like the hottest Northern Hemisphere summer in recorded history, what’s been called the worst flooding in Greek history after a rare Mediterranean tropical storm, with the heavy rains coming just weeks after the largest wildfires ever recorded in Europe, the very first tropical storm warning in California owing to a rare Pacific hurricane, the largest wildfires in recorded history in so-called Canada…

I think this is such a critical moment because the way the media, NGOs, academics, and governments are conditioning us to think about the crisis is simultaneously an enormous lie and an enormous truth. First the truth: the way that the Earth’s atmosphere has been altered is visible in our every day lives, it is killing people, and it is getting worse. This truth is important because it means it is an urgent question of our survival – and therefore a legitimate question of self-defense – and it reaffirms that we can trust our own experiences and observations, provided we are actually rooted in and attentive towards the world around us. We can fit our daily lives and our experience in one corner of the world into a solidaristic and cohesive global narrative.

The lie is this: that these deaths are unprecedented, that climate change is an appropriate framework for understanding these deaths, and that we can trust current scientific models around tipping points, around predictions of “when it’s too late,” around carbon offset and emissions reductions schemes.

IGD: Was there a turning point – whatever that means – this summer? It seems we’ve reached a peak within popular consciousness with the record heat wave. Does this mean anything?

Peter Gelderloos: There was not a tipping point, and the apparent peak in consciousness has been a triumph of false consciousness. Because the truth is it was too late a long time ago. Depending on where you look in the world and what forms of life you decide to value, it was too late one thousand years ago, it was too late 531 years ago, it was too late 101 years ago, it was too late 50 years ago.

The truth is that for decades already, entire ecosystems and many of the species that make them up have been completely destroyed, for decades already tens of million of humans are dying every year as a result of this broad ecological crisis, and for centuries the extractivist societal forms responsible for the ecological crisis have been colonizing and eradicating the societal forms that take care of their ecosystems and that also tend to resist human-to-human oppressions.

The truth is that while the scientific method for producing knowledge does have a demonstrable value, models for predicting ecosystemic tipping points and the rate of climatic change have proven largely unreliable and generally conservative, so that specific branch of science has demonstrated is too faulty to bear any strategic weight when we are facing life-and-death choices.

The truth is that “climate crisis” is a framework that belongs to those who are trying to murder us and profit off it. The climate is just one part of a greater and interconnected crisis, and if we only focus on the climate, we will never see the root causes and the worst forms of suffering that are going on. This crisis is not caused by humans. It is not “anthropogenic.” It is caused by those humans who have given their lives over to a framework of institutions that are extractivist and oppressive to their cores, institutions that have the power to force the rest of us into line and participate in their life-devouring society whether we choose to resist or choose to look the other way. This framework, fundamentally, means the State.

As I demonstrated in Worshiping Power all states are extractivist and all states in history have been ecocidal. A shared trait of those who want to reform Leviathan, whether these are XR campaigners, climate researchers, paid NGO activists, authoritarian Marxists, or crypto-authoritarians, is that they try to hide or decenter the role of the State in this crisis. Previously, states only provoked regional ecological collapses, which was one major impetus for their systematic turn towards colonial expansion.

The extractivist systems that states represent, though, must expand or die. Since the revolutions that have been overthrowing states for thousands of years were not able to cultivate a sufficiently global and systemic consciousness, the only other option was that states would create a world system. And this means inventing the possibility of a global ecological crisis. The modern state found a suitable engine in capitalism, and it found a world-devouring worldview capable of organizing intercontinental colonization in white supremacy. On Planet Earth, there is no capitalism that is not colonial and thus racial, there is no capitalism without the State, and there is no state that is not extractivist and patriarchal and thus ecocidal and oppressive, an enemy to all life.

IGD: This summer, we saw both a slew of neoliberal articles on ‘life hacks‘ on how to adjust your body to extreme temperatures as well as in Greece, a wave of anti-migrant sentiment as fires rages and conspiracy theories spread. How do we push back against this?

Peter Gelderloos: It is inevitable that when we have a false consciousness around a crisis like this, the hegemonic responses will be individualistic–privileging the consumer with money to spend ethically, the citizen with the right to vote for better candidates, both of them revitalizing the institutions that have caused this crisis–or they will promote pseudo-communities like the nation-state, with their artificial, bloody borders, and their ready cast of scapegoats and villains, who are nearly always pure inventions or more oppressed groups of people, simultaneously internal and external, always too foreign to comprehend and close enough to pose a threat.

Fortunately there is a synthesis between strategies and goals when we are honest with ourselves about what we are facing. Patriarchal society and colonial capitalism, organized by the State, are the enemy to all life. They have proven we cannot share this planet with them, and we do not need to because they are not living beings. They are a hard limit. Only up to that limit is it possible to have a world in which many worlds fit.

The major strategic obstacles to destroying the State are the two arms of the State, the Left and the Right (understanding Left in its historical sense and not in its amnesiac anglophone non-sense, in which it is reputed to mean vague, unspecified, good, incoherent things). To generalize, the Left renews, updates, and revitalizes oppressive structures, giving us Black cops, women millionaires, and recycled toilet paper, and the Right punishes resistance with the attempt to eradicate it. When you get into the messy details, the Left also carries out policing, and the Right also tries to renew oppressive structures like the nation-state, but the point is they both serve the State. In moments of social peace, they are more coordinated, in moments of social upheaval like the present one, they are unable to see past their alibi-giving mythologies and increasingly suspect one another of being a threat to Leviathan as a whole.

IGD: We’re seeing things like eco-systems being hit in big ways due to ice melting and other signs of life support systems being impacted – what do you see happening in the coming years that we should be ready for that is going to impact the situation here in so-called North America?

Peter Gelderloos: That question needs to be answered within every specific bioregion, with their specific human and ecological histories. The consumerist patterns of movement that are prevalent in North America, especially in middle-class circles, make it impossible to create those answers. An inability to listen also makes it impossible. Men and white people are all socialized not to listen, so we need to emphasize learning how to. Those who have bought into Western civilization, who, for example, treat their smartphones with more respect than they do people around them, are never going to be able to come up with adequate, rooted answers to the question of surviving-together. Anyone who scoffs at the idea of listening to migratory birds, to forests, to mountains, have no fucking clue and will not even be capable of finding the real conversation that is providing these answers.

Here is an analytical tool that might help. What defines a person? We should consider that a person is any being with whom dialogue is possible and meaningful. Therefore a cop or a millionaire, while human, are not people. The blue jay outside my window is a person. Let’s give our attention and care to people, since if they are people we can share a world with them. Let’s aim our rage and our destructive abilities at the institutions and their loyal robots, because they will never share a world with us.

IGD: The big climate movement is off the streets right at a time when things are at their worst. As anarchists and participants in autonomous movements, what’s the way forward?

Peter Gelderloos: This is also a conversation that I think needs to happen in every corner of the world, though I suspect a smaller number of patterns will stand out than in the conversation about what each particular ecosystem needs to do to survive and adapt.

In the past twenty years, on every continent, we have toppled long-standing regimes, we have defeated the police, we have helped an anti-racist, anti-colonial, and ecological consciousness temporarily become the norm, and we have helped marginalized groups win more spaces for survival, for healing, for joy. (Not a we helping a them but a we-among-us helping ourselves and another we-among-us standing in solidarity with others among us helping themselves.) We’ve accomplished things that in the prior two decades seemed unimaginable.

And our wave of powerful rebellions clearly preceded the economic downturn of 2007/2008. It is vital to remember this and pass this memory on, especially because the priests of materialism are clawing back out of their well deserved graves to try to tell us that we are objects secondary to the calculations of global monetary systems, despite how deadly wrong they proved to be the last time we gave them a hearing, a few generations back. We are not those objects. We are living beings, battered by numerous intersecting oppressive systems that operate in both quantifiable and unquantifiable ways, and we make choices, and those choices matter. We are neither individuals nor identical objects.

Since that wave of rebellions, though, we have lost ground in most places around the world. We need to ask ourselves why, thoroughly and unafraid of what we might learn, and we must share those lessons because our survival depends on them.

I believe in many places we will find that we succumbed to repression, because we had not learned the lessons of previous generations on how to survive it and because we have not valued the roles of care and healing and survival as much as we have valued the role of the attack. And I say that as someone who has spent my life trying to build our capacity to attack and to validate those attacks, given how pacified we were in the ’90s and ’00s. But no oppressive society can be destroyed by negation alone, and those who attack need to also know how to survive the reactions to those attacks.

In other places, we have succumbed to authoritarian currents taking over social movements and spaces of rebellion. (In truth, repression and recuperation always happen together, but one of the two might be predominant, one might fail and then the next succeed.) The repressive forces of the State are immense, and when we can’t withstand them, the most we can do is lick our wounds and identify what we might have done better. However, when movements and spaces of resistance leave us behind, it is nearly always a direct result of internal failures that were not inevitable.

Did we uphold norms around participation that favored those with more resources–the university educated, the middle class, the neurotypical, people without trauma or chronic health problems, people without children or others to take care, people with citizenship, white people? Did we reproduce patriarchal value systems around communication styles, around what forms of struggle are celebrated and rewarded, what forms are ignored, what forms are exploited?

Did we forget our history and enter into non-critical alliances with NGOs and political parties, or sideline ourselves with an expedient acceptance of a single-issue focus, a reformist framework? Did we repeat the great error of antifascism and see only the Right as a danger, while giving a pass to democracy or authoritarian socialists? Did we create a new error of nihilism, so that the historically valid critiques offered by insurrectionalism were drowned in a renewed fetishism of armed groups (ironic, given the exact context the insurrectionary critique was reacting to).

Did we let ourselves be conditioned by dogmatism or the architecture of social networks and create spaces of resistance that were so toxic, only bullies and sycophants could thrive there? Did we fail to develop practices of survival, of healing, of transformation, of mutual growth, so that all we had was a hammer and all we could see were nails?

Did we fail to connect struggles in decentralized ways, spreading logics of solidarity that allowed everyone to support and learn from one another, while not allowing anyone to take over? Did we forget to develop strategies for the day after, how to spread joyous, meaningful life, once we’d burnt everything? Have we lost the ability to imagine being anything else, creating anything else, living any other way?

IGD: Tell us how you are doing – you recently had a fundraiser for your health, how can people support you?

Peter Gelderloos: I am doing, alternately, terribly and wonderfully, which is normal for me since I’m bipolar. My tumor is considered incurable but treatable, so from a doctor’s point of view it’s a question of extending life expectancy, improving their stats. That’s not how I’m going to approach my life and my death.

I’ll get the support I need from myself and those closest to me. Anyone reading this because I have a platform because books or whatever, I would ask them to think about a few things. Many more people are getting cancer and other fatal or chronic health problems. Sickness is not an individual affair. Our world is sick. People deserve whatever space they need as they heal or as they die, but the sickness itself cannot remain private. We need to put our tumors, our inflammations, our breakdowns, our tears, our dead, carry them with bloody hands and put them on capitalism’s doorstep. Not to demand compensation or redress, but as the only explanation we need, the only possible word of truth, before we burn it all down, Leviathan and all those who choose to defend it instead of defending life.

Suffering cannot keep happening behind these metaphorically closed doors. Those who take care of us when we are suffering are our truest comrades. Learn from them and take care of them, for fuck’s sake.

Don’t support me, support all of us. This is a collective problem.

Maybe we could foster struggles that are worth living for and dying for. Maybe we could imagine worlds where we’d actually like to live, where we’d feel grateful to lay our bodies down once our time has come.

Thanks for running this site, and all the work you do for all of us.

______

SOURCE: https://itsgoingdown.org/heating-up-peter-gelderloos-interview/

The post Heating Up: An Interview with Peter Gelderloos on Climate Change and the Fight to Change Everything appeared first on Void Network.

Humans are an extraordinary result of evolution. It is a great power to be the most highly evolved creature in our conceivable knowledge and, in that, each one of us has a great responsibility. Problem solving is something that all humans do intuitively every day. It matters not what class, race, age, educational level; every single person can and does solve problems every day. The size, form and manifestations of those problems vary greatly but there is one major problem that transcends the rest and affects every single one of us. That problem is capitalism. This form of free-trade economics based on infinite growth models has proven to be unsustainable. A modern-day solution to the problems posed on the Earth and faced by all animals, human and otherwise, due to human activities can be found in the United Nation’s (2015) 17 Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs. There has also existed since as early as the 19th century a political philosophy that can provide a social, political, and economic framework to accompany the well-defined scientific solutions to our environmental issues. Anarchism, as a political philosophy, realizes that society is entirely able to govern itself (Miller, 2003, 3) and was originally introduced as a critique to industrial capitalism (Proudhon, 1893, 48). It is not within the realm of this essay to defend anarchism against the negative portrayal it has received*. Instead, Proudhon’s political anarchism will be used to accompany the UN’s Sustainable Development as a social, political, and economic framework for a sustainable planet.

Goal 16 of the Sustainable Development Goals calls for “peace, justice, and strong institutions”. Evidently, these virtues are something the global community seemingly lacks. Conventional anarchism focuses on individual and societal cooperation and cohesion and “urges man to think, to investigate, to analyze every proposition” (Goldman, 1921, 22-23). Instilling Proudhon’s anarchic political philosophy, ideologies, and practices will make achieving this goal more realistic because it has been developed through inductive reasoning (Proudhon, 1893). As seen on the “Scale of Knowledge” from Dr. Floris van den Berg, the same highly certain method of acquiring knowledge is also used in the natural sciences, such as physics and chemistry (van den Berg, 2012). In this sense, anarchism is something of the science of politics. As our species developed free-will over basic survival instincts, people were the first animals to live outside of natural law. This affords us countless innovations that provide the comfort and safety to question existence. Before science, it was widely believed that we were descendants of divine beings and, given only the condition that we follow a set of rules established by these gods, the Earth and everything on it was infinite and made for us. This anthropocentric perspective instilled with heteronomous ethics is still widely engrained in global society. However, the recognition of anthropogenic environmental impact can be dated back as far as Plato’s Critias dialogues where he unconcernedly notes soil erosion and deforestation due to agricultural advancements (Attfield, 2018, 3). The fatal flaw of humanity is the continuance of anthropocentricism. If one can only view humans as the apex of life for whom the Earth was created, as opposed to one step in evolutionary time, it is not possible to live sustainably. This alongside prescribed heteronomous ethics systematically removes the virtues of self-awareness, self-responsibility, and autonomy necessary to understand that the ecosystem is finite and that perhaps we are not the be-all, end-all of biological evolution.

Anarchism attempts to bring these virtues to the forefront of humanity by calling for the elimination of overruling heteronomous virtues found in the institutions of religion, property, and government (Goldman, 1910; Proudhon, 1892). Following the Green Revolution in the 1950s, which involved using newly developed artificial fertilizers and heavy irrigation techniques to maximize food production, the development of environmental science and concern for the effects of increased large-scale agriculture and industrialization rapidly became more prevalent. With the release of The Silent Spring by Rachel Carson in 1962, the non-scientific community was able to read an alluring and beautifully written prose that clearly outlined the spread of pollutants from one side of the world to the other (Attfield, 2018, 3). In 1972, The Limits to Growth was published. Written by an international team of multidisciplinary academics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it evaluated those factors which limit growth of our species could be narrowed into five basics: population growth, nonrenewable resource capacity, industrial and agricultural production rates, and pollution output (Meadows et al, 1972, 11). Clearly, these five indicators hold true today. The Limits to Growth also set out to provide an accessible handbook for how people can “achieve a state of global equilibrium” by limiting ourselves and our production of material goods; thus, we can “live indefinitely” (Meadows et al, 1972). These texts were some of the first initiatives by environmentalists to provide complex information in a concise, accessible manner for the general public. In this sense, the various researchers concerned for the environment aimed to expand the anthropocentrism that dominated to a more “ecocentric” (Attfield, 2018, 12) worldview. While it is a much more distorted and silenced voice, anarchism (Goldman, 1910; Proudhon, 1893) recognized this ecocentric worldview by maintaining the philosophy that Gods and the State are socially constructed authoritative figures that can only exist through the peoples’ submission to the rules outlined by these archetypal figures.

Meanwhile, just around the time The Limits to Growth was published, a new ideology of capitalism had been introduced and rapidly appropriated by governments and industries worldwide. It promoted most notably three assumptions: (1) “commercial value could be maximized by handing management of companies and public policy to exceptionally smart, and highly motivated people”, (2) “commercial value, so maximized, would be a good proxy for social value without government interference”, and (3) “the redistributions of income resulting from this maximization, whether within countries or between them, were not a proper concern for economists” (Collier et al, 2021, 638). These quotations are from Capitalism: what has gone wrong, what needs to be changed, and how it can be fixed, a 2021 article in the Oxford Review of Economic Policies which poses these questions to a selection of leading capitalist economists. Their summation of these assumptions is immediately followed by the statement: “Unfortunately, no part of this new ideology proved to be correct” (Collier et al, 2021, 638). As well, the article states that these 3 main drivers of the newest manifestation of capitalism “resulted in social and political polarizations which have become unsustainable” (Collier et al, 2021, 638). It is clear there is now consensus on all sides that the current dominating economic methodology and resulting society is unsustainable and the result of misinformed, misdirected guidance (Attfield, 2018; Collier et al, 2021; Goldman, 1910; Miller, 2010; Proudhon, 1893; van den Berg, 2012). In this revelation, it gives hope that there are grounds for systemic change.

A common term used to critique globalization and free-market capitalism is ‘neocolonialism’. It describes the phenomenon wherein nations that were previously ravaged due to colonialism are now targeted for extremely valuable resources such as precious metals and oil. In statements such as, “The major untapped pool of cheap young workers for the next few decades is Africa and the region is ripe for conventional capitalism”, also extracted from page 643 of the 2021 Oxford Economic Policy Review article, it is clear we must be vigilant in deciding on a global system that will not lead us back but forward. Global free-market capitalism is seen as a “neo” or new form of colonialization. Another view of this can be found in the article in defense of capitalism in the distinction between “winners” and “large groups of uncompensated losers” under the capitalist system (Collier et al, 2021). Aptly so, the result was and is “disaffection and political activism with unpredictable repercussions” (Collier et al, 2021). No deliberation is provided in the article. The only understanding of political activism in this statement is with the vague, negative association of “unpredictable repercussions”. This presents a fallacy of what can come from positive political activism in response to unsatisfactory laws and regulations. One direct example of positive political activism by anarchists is dumpster-diving. Ann Meneley (2018) presents specifically the point of view of Danish dumpster-divers that, “It is perceived as functional, as wasting is seen as stupid”, though this is a view taken by most modern anarchists. Meneley also recognizes the group “Food Not Bombs” which is an international anarchist collective that feeds the impoverished and homeless populations with meals cooked entirely from ‘dumpstered’ food. Dumpster diving is an act of direct rebellion that only exists when a nation lives outside of its means. Educating the Stupid is a concept developed by Dr. van den Berg (2012) which discusses, in part, that the combined ecological footprint of the global population must stay within the Planet’s carrying capacity for our species. The same concept is reverberated through The Limits of Growth report. The seemingly incendiary title of this ethical concept sets to reiterate an ethical standard that has resounded in the speech of many great minds such as Albert Einstein who is famously quoted to have said: “The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing”. In the age of knowledge and technology, it is no longer acceptable to feign ignorance of the various consequences of lives based on production, consumption, and infinite growth in a finite ecosystem. At this point, there is only stupidity in those of us who know and do not act.

Aside from the environmental and societal devastation caused by global trade and industry practices, the driving force of capitalism, consumerism, is inherently unsustainable. Though once viewed as a sign of wealth and well-being when a country’s citizens were able to be effective spenders, nowadays, consumerism is being discussed more frequently as a health detriment (Meneley, 2018). On one hand, citizens in impoverished regions, ie. the “losers”, live lives of “involuntary simplicity” (Meneley, 2018). Meanwhile, mental illnesses exhibited in behaviors such as hoarding and physical illnesses such as morbid obesity are rampant in wealthier nations, or the nations of “winners”. Consequently, initiatives encouraging minimalism, or “voluntary simplicity”, immerge in response to these ailments of overconsumption (Meneley, 2018). Capitalism focuses on unbridled maximization of profit through consumer spending, thus requires branding and advertising techniques to promote greater consumption. These tactics often include creating a sense of self for the consumer and encouraging “self-branding”, as the consumer should view themselves as a commodity (Meneley, 2018). Anarchism brings value to individual freedom of expression and calls for the elimination of property (Goldman, 1910; Proudhon, 1893). As expressed so eloquently by Emma Goldman, a distinguished anarchist and feminist pioneer, value is manifested by someone “to whom the making of a table, the building of a house, or the tilling of the soil, is what the painting is to the artist and the discovery to the scientist, — the result of inspiration, of intense longing, and deep interest in work as a creative force” (Goldman, 1921, 24). In other words, anarchism encourages the individual to find what work they can do that does not ultimately feel like work but feels like the fulfillment of one’s personal values. This recognition of ‘self’ in a career path allows for a level of self-responsibility and social obligation often not afforded by a consumer driven society.

So, while globalized trade ravages the underdeveloped nations, consumerism plagues the rest, and the greatest damage is incurred by the ecosystem and non-human animals. Just as no one would deny the atrocities of imperialism, colonialization, fascism, or any other form of absolute authoritative rule, the vast disparities between the winners and losers under capitalism are well-known. Additionally, the complete devastation of the planet’s biodiversity, natural resources, and the ecosystem is not news. The current world economic system and alleged lack of political interference have failed. The solution needs to be a complete reformation of these elements.

In the conclusion of the Oxford Economic Policy Review, the capitalist economists sum up three underlying issues that are commonly reported on about how “the pathologies of economics have misdirected policies”. They are in short: (1) “…inadequate depiction of the individual in conventional economics as a person preoccupied with consumption and leisure. In contrast, evolutionary biology suggests we are strongly motivated by purposes beyond consumption and leisure with a capacity to be morally load-bearing”, (2) “…widespread support for greater devolution to local decision-taking, and an emphasis on the importance of cooperation in communities. Far from being selfishly individualistic, humans have a strong capacity to cooperate in communities”, and (3) “…the human brain has evolved to be well-suited to decisions under uncertainty, and decisions devolved to teams within which people naturally cooperate enable rapid learning through experimentation and copying”, (Collier at al, 2021, 647). Conventional anarchism has always encompassed these exact ideologies, as it is a century-old political reformative plan developed due to disaffection with the capitalist economic system in an industrializing, globalizing world (Proudhon, 1893). In this, Proudhon’s anarchic political philosophy is the only available, long-standing social-political framework to achieve a sustainable planet.

Lina Miller

*See the following text for additional information on this topic:

Egoumenides, M. (2014). Philosophical Anarchism and Political Obligation. Bloomsbury Academic.

Pritchard, A. (2010). What can the absence of anarchism tell us about the history and purpose of International Relations? Review of International Studies, 37, 1647–1669. doi:10.1017/S0260210510001075

References:

• Attfield, D. (2018). Environmental Ethics. A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press
  Collier, P. et al. (2021). Capitalism: what has gone wrong, what needs to change, and how it can be fixed. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 37 (4), 637–649 https://doi.org/10.1093/oxrep/grab035
• Proudhon, J.P. (1893). Property is Theft. In D. Guérin & P. Sharkey (Eds.), No Gods, No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism (pp. 48-54). AK Press.
• Goldman, E. (1910). Anarchism: What it really stands for. In H. Havel (Eds.), Anarchism and other essays (pp. 21-29). Mother Earth Publishing Association.
• Meadows, D.H. et al. (1972). The Limits to Growth: A report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. Potomac Associates. https://www.clubofrome.org/publication/the-limits-to-growth/
• Meneley, A. (2018.) Consumerism. Annual Review of Anthropology 47, 117-132, https://doi-org.proxy.library.uu.nl/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102116-041518
• Miller, D. (2003). Political Philosophy: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• United Nations. (2015). THE 17 GOALS: Sustainable Development. In Sdgs.Un.Org. Retrieved January 4, 2022, from https://sdgs.un.org/goals
• Van den Berg, F. & Meindertsma, J. (2012). Ethics: Philosophy for a Better World. [Poster for PSE2 course]. Geosciences Department. Utrecht University.
• Van den Berg, F. & Meindertsma, J. (2012). Philosophy of Science. [Poster for PSE2 course]. Geosciences Department. Utrecht University.

The post Make Anarchism Great Again appeared first on Void Network.

The turbines proposed vastly exceed the islands’ actual needs and are meant to outsource energy to other Greek locations. The wind turbines will not only visually impact the islands’ landscape, but they will have effects on their morphology and climate,, endangering both their flora and fauna and, consequently, the agricultural, livestock and touristic sectors of their economies. Undoubtedly, this will diminish the landscape’s environmental and cultural value and place the livelihood of local communities at risk.

A study recently published by the University of Ioannina demonstrates that Greece can meet its EU target for the installation of renewable energy systems without any further permit for wind turbines in nature preservation areas. Elliniki Etairia “Society for the Environment and Cultural Heritage”  submitted a proposal to exclude nature preservation areas from the wind turbine programme to the Greek Ministry of Environment and Energy.

Elliniki Etairia, Europa Nostra’s country representation in Greece, nominated these Five Southern Aegean Islands for the 7 Most Endangered Programme 2021. Elliniki Etairia has fought for a sustainable lifestyle using renewable energy since 1972. However, in the case of these Five Southern Aegean Islands, Elliniki Etairia seeks for alternative and balanced clean-energy solutions rather than wind parks, together with an in-depth consultation process with local communities and experts. Elliniki Etairia has recently been contacted by many other community groups and municipalities requesting similar advice and support.

The siting of renewable energy infrastructure in (protected) cultural landscapes is among the potential conflicts between heritage safeguarding and European Green Deal action identified in the recently launched European Cultural Heritage Green Paper “Putting Europe’s shared heritage at the heart of the European Green Deal”. This Paper reflects our firm conviction that, in the case of such tensions, ‘win-win’ scenarios are both desirable and attainable on the basis of a proper consultation process with local communities and heritage experts.

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source: http://7mostendangered.eu/sites/five-southern-aegean-islands-greece

The post SOS Five Greek Islands in great danger appeared first on Void Network.

But a growing movement called agro-forestry “capitalizes” on the free services forests provide farmers and gardeners.

Not only do trees protect more delicate edible plants from the elements and extreme weather, they provide nutrients, water, pest control and pollination services.

Although you might not find all your traditional annual veggies in a forest garden, you will discover hundreds of new varieties of edible plants you never knew existed, that are often more nutrient-dense and flavorful.

And if you choose your plants carefully, they will propagate themselves each year and live symbiotically among the hundreds of diverse species around them, requiring no tilling, planting, fertilizing, weeding or watering.

This is what Martin Crawford has done in his 2-acre forest garden in England for over 20 years — let it do the work for him for the most part, after a few years of research and legwork.

While the initial planting of the forest required years of research and watering, Crawford now has over 500 varieties of food growing wild in his garden, which requires very little work other than plucking and eating the fruits of his “labor.”

From time to time, he adds a new exotic species to his garden or stomps on some overgrown cow parsley to give other herbs a chance to catch up, but for the most part, he’s “playing and tinkering” in his garden, rather than doing anything that resembles work.

In his book Creating a Forest Garden, he describes how a complete garden should include 7 layers:

1. Tall trees

2. Smaller trees

3. Shrubs

4. Perrenials

5. Groundcover

6. Root crops

7. Climbing vines

It includes directly useful plants like fruit trees, nuts, tubers, vegetables, medicinal herbs, timber. It also includes indirectly useful plants that help the system function better like nitrogen fixers, mineral accumulators, plants that attract beneficial insects that eat pests.

Because almost all of the plants are perennial, there’s no need to “dig the soil.”

“Not digging the soil is really important in terms of sustainability because every time you dig the soil, a load of carbon goes into the air,” Martin says in the video below:

Additionally, digging or tilling the soil to plant annual crops, releases nutrients, and kills bacteria, fungi and other microorganisms that keep the soil alive by exposing them to the sun.

The soil in a forest garden is extra rich because the deep tree roots breakdown minerals deep in the subsoil and bring the nutrients up to the topsoil. They also drop leaves, which act as a natural compost.

Also, the canopy layer of the trees keeps moisture from evaporating out of the garden, so that as your forest grows denser you will have to do less and less watering. When forests grow big enough, they create their own rainfall, eliminating the need for irrigation altogether.

And… Crawford notes, the forest attracts wild game, so if you’re into meat, you don’t have to raise it, you can just shoot it.

So, in short, don’t clear the forest to start a farm, let the forest grow your food for you.

For a more in depth tour of Crawford’s garden, check out this longer video and buy one of his books

_____________________________

source: returntonow.net

READ ALSO:

Agro-forestry, a new fashion of old tradition?

The post Forest Garden With 500 Edible Plants Requires Only a Few Hours of Work Per Month appeared first on Void Network.

* * * * *

1. The Invisible Hand is strangling us

“The Invisible Hand is one of (neo)classical economics’ most enduring mythologies. Its magical power is to ensure that social benefit is maximised as long as everyone acts in their own self-interest through the market—apparently. But what if the Invisible Hand were less benign than this? The recent torrent of images of police brutality which have come out of the US, have got me wondering whether this is the Invisible Hand at work—keeping the Ponzi scheme we call capitalism at play. Maybe it was the Invisible Hand that knocked on my partner’s door a couple of years ago demanding instant payment on an old debt, ‘or else’. Perhaps it was the Invisible Hand that set off the brutal explosion that destroyed the 46,000 year old sacred caves of the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people in the Juukan Gorge, on behalf of Rio Tinto.”

(The Invisible Hand, an art project by Lara Luna Bartley@MoneyLab#X)

The Invisible Hand is clearly strangling humankind, as Gunther Anders had predicted already during the years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In his text, We, Sons of Eichmann, Anderswrites that the template of Nazism will reach its perfection when technology will get the upper hand over human beings. Auschwitz had been the first experiment in the industrialised management of extermination, and today the conjoint forces of technology and racism are preparing the Endlosung on a planetary scale. As Anders wrote:

“We can expect that the horrors of the Reich to come will vastly eclipse the horrors of yesterday’s Reich. Doubtless, when one day our children or grandchildren, proud of their perfect ‘co-mechanization’, look down from the great heights of their thousand year Reich at yesterday’s empire, at the so-called ‘third’ Reich, it will seem to them merely a minor, provincial experiment.” (We Sons of Eichmann).

This appalling prediction is coming true. The automation of extermination, according to Anders, is the essential contribution brought about by the Nazi machinery, and in our postmodern and postindustrial age, the project of automated extermination can be implemented on a much larger scale than during the age of Hitler.

2. What we couldn’t see in the 1970s  

Activists that came of age during the second half of last century were not prepared to face a comeback of the sort of ferocity that once epitomized Nazism. But in the new century, that ferocity is back: the Trump administration has restaged horrific spectacles like the separation of migrant children from their families, one of countless acts of inhuman violence extending around the globe, and particularly against migrants. 

The culture of the Italian Autonomia movement, of which I was a participant back in the day, did anticipate many aspects of the present transformation in the field of labour, technology, and class composition, but was essentially unable to foresee the exhaustion of economic growth, and was equally unaware of the persistent dynamics of fascist subjectivation.

In spite of the publication of the report on The Limits of Growth (1971), we simply did not realize the long term effects entailed by a collapse of the physical environment, nor did we fully appreciate the effects of the psychic breakdown provoked by the unbounded exploitation of mental energies. 

This is why, if we want to think about the strategies of the contemporary movement and the tactical forms of resistance that are needed now, I don’t think that my experience of the Italian 1970s helps all that much.

In the following notes, I try to reconsider the possibility of autonomous subjectivation from within the horizon of extinction disclosed by the pandemic collapse. 

3. Convulsion

In Fall of 2019 a convulsion shook the planetary body: from Hong Kong to Bogotà, from Barcelona to Beirut, Quito, Baghdad, La Paz, Santiago and Valparaiso, young people, mostly unemployed and precarious workers took to the streets in a sort of global riot. No common strategy was visible in this upheaval, no common goals. What was common, however, was a sense of suffocation, of unbearable suffering, the sense of despair expressed by the words, ‘I can’t breathe’. Three movies of interest capture that moment: Joker, by Todd Phillips, Parasite by Bong Joon-ho, and Sorry we missed you, by Ken Loach.

Then, after the convulsion, the collapse.

The pandemics that spread in the first months of 2020 acted as a sort of psycho-deflation: the global machine came abruptly to a halt.

This breakdown should not be read as an insulated event, but rather as the revelation of a multiplicity of catastrophic processes that had been underway for many years, and which suddenly crashed together: economic stagnation, environmental devastation, psychic frailty of the social organism exhausted by techno-financial aggression and the digital acceleration of nervous stimulation. 

4. Apocalypse

Etymologically speaking, this is an Apocalypse: a moment of truth in which it becomes clear that the neoliberal economy is incompatible with the survival of humankind. What is the new horizon that we are (not so) slowly discovering during the pandemic threshold? Extinction. This word, which never belonged to the political lexicon, takes central stage in the social imagination for the first time in history.

Agonising movements for liberal democracy and neo-reactionary identity (national, racial, religious, cultural, and otherwise) converge towards global civil war: identitarian conflicts in every country of the world, violence against migrants, and geopolitical chaos. The economic aggressiveness of neoliberal globalisation has fuelled the dementio-cracy of Trump: demented senescent white males obsessed by the fading of their supremacy, by their impotence. 

At last, neoliberalism is revealed to be the economic strategy of Fascism.

Social movements can do nothing to dispel this tendency. We must survive the storm, and we must create, multiply, and defend—by any means necessary—virtual and physical spaces of respiration, self-therapy, social and technical experimentation.

5. Therapy

The insurrection that followed the public execution of George Floyd by the Ku Klux Klan in blue uniforms has marked the emergence of a subjectivity that is simultaneously anti-racist, multi-racial and anti-capitalist, and acts as massive therapy for the suffocating body of the precarious class, the new intergenerational and interracial proletariat of the United States.

In the wake of the pandemic, riots have been the only way of avoiding suffocation: insurrection is first aid for the social organism and the social brain.

But now, despite the fragmentation of the precarious social body, we must perform an act of strategic imagination: what is the agenda of the movement for the coming time, particularly in the U.S., where the elections—no matter who wins—will likely open a period of widespread instability and violence?

Should we be involved in the American struggle for power, or should we stay out of the fray while the disintegration of the U.S. unfolds? 

Social movements should not be trapped in the struggle between liberal (imperialist) democracy and nationalist dementio-cracy. Nevertheless we should seize every occasion for the creation of spaces of autonomous life, and we should constantly assert and reassert a simple concept: redistribution of wealth is the only way out of hell. Equality, frugality, and redistribution of wealth.

6. Collapse

Whatever financial measures the state may take, the capitalist economy will not resurrect itself. No recovery, no growth, no social peace are in sight for the next ten years. Still, as long as we are unable to escape the corpse of capitalism, this corpse will continue imposing its rules upon us, which no longer correspond whatsoever to the dynamics of social possibility.

In this period, as we resist the convergent aggressions of racism and corporate capital, as we attempt to survive, we must learn the lesson of the pandemic collapse: the integrated domain of techno-financial abstraction was severed by the biological materiality of the virus. What is needed now is not monetary abstraction, but useful products of knowledge and cooperation: food, care, education. Nutritional self-reliance, public health measures, and autonomy in education will be the concerns of the social movement. We know that this will not happen peacefully, and that the violence of economic power and of fascism will constantly threaten social autonomy. Therefore, the problem of self-defence must be a permanent subject of awareness and experimentation.

7. Trauma

Presently, as the pandemic continues to unfold, large corporations are extracting enormous profits from the widespread distress, and inequality is skyrocketing: a small minority of people are thriving on the suffering of the large majority of the human kind. 

This is the effect of a rule that is embedded like an automatism in our language, imagination, and daily life: subjection to monetary rule, and above all to debt—it’s a mental trap that the ongoing trauma just might possibly sever. This trauma will unfold over a long period of time, as its effects in culture, behavior, and in the collective unconscious are progressively registered. 

We must act upon our post-traumatic mental evolution: we need to heal and simultaneously to revive solidarity.

8. Insolvency

As the global economy will be in a state of permanent collapse, society must learn to become independent of the market, and must create the conditions for extra-market survival. We must experiment at a small and large scale with nutrition, education, sanitary self-reliance, and the deactivation of monetary rule over everyday life, whenever and wherever this is possible. 

The expropriation of the expropriators must to be organised scientifically—a redistribution of wealth is the only way to avoid a planetary holocaust. 

Non-recognition of debt must be declared whenever and wherever it is possible. A general insolvency has to be organized.

I know that this is wishful thinking at the present moment. 

I know that the majority of people are seeking protection in identity, belonging, nation, race… and this is escalating war. I know that we cannot stop this trend, as the aggressive energies accumulated in the past decades, and exacerbated in the Trump years, are inertially headed toward a clash. I know that this storm cannot be dispelled completely; however, we should try to sidestep the storm as much as possible, and to create spaces of autonomy. 

9. Happiness

Extinction has emerged as the horizon of our young century.

Let’s relax and accept this reality, and not panic. After all, to devolve sooner or later into nothing is the fate of every organism.

For now, the question is this: is a happy life possible within the horizon of extinction?

If not, we’re doomed, and extinction will be the only outcome of frantic competition and military enmity, after a period of expansive hell.

But I don’t believe that we are doomed—yes, a happy life is possible within the horizon of extinction. 

Individual extinction is in no way a new perspective: we are familiar with the prospect of our individual mortality. However, we have managed here and there to create the conditions for a happy life, haven’t we? So this is the task: to create and proliferate conditions for happiness, no matter what.

Reality is brutal, but we must avoid growing brutal ourselves: this, today, is one possible meaning of the word “autonomy.”

Only when a large minority (a movement) is able to show that a happy life is possible in the horizon of extinction, can a line of escape from extinction possibly be found.

Oct 23th, 2020

Images: David Maisel

source: Ill Will Editions

The post Extinction, Rebellion, Happiness- by Franco ‘BIFO’ Berardi appeared first on Void Network.

Indigenous peoples have faced the end of the world before. Now, humankind is on a collective march towards the abyss. Global pandemics, extreme weather, and massive wildfires define this era many now call the Anthropocene.

From Brazil comes Ailton Krenak, renowned Indigenous activist and leader, who demonstrates that our current environmental crisis is rooted in society’s flawed concept of “humanity” — that human beings are superior to other forms of nature and are justified in exploiting it as we please.

To stop environmental disaster, Krenak argues that we must reject the homogenizing effect of this perspective and embrace a new form of “dreaming” that allows us to regain our place within nature. In Ideas to Postpone the End of the World, he shows us the way.

Reviews:

“Ailton Krenak’s words, expressed with the visceral intensity of one of those peoples who ‘still consider the need to stay attached to this land, ‘ … fill me with hope. Amid the successive catastrophes we experience today, he surprises us once again by teaching that the fight for a better world, a world that can be called home, involves not only explicit activism, but dance, music, the stories we tell at night.” — Aparecida Vilaça, anthropologist and author of Strange Enemies: Indigenous Agency and Scenes of Encounters in Amazonia and Praying and Preying: Christianity in Indigenous Amazonia

About the Contributors:

Ailton Krenak was born in Minas Gerais, Brazil, in the Krenak homelands along the Doce River Valley, a region where mining operations have severely affected the ecology. A socio-environmental activist and campaigner for Indigenous rights, he organized the Alliance of Forest Peoples, which unites riverine and Indigenous communities throughout the Amazon. He has consistently been one of the best-known campaigners in the movement set in motion by the Indigenous Awakening in the 1970s and was a key figure in the formation of the Union of Indigenous Nations (UIN), which brought together 180 different Indigenous groups across the country in a unified front to push for rights. In his capacity as a journalist, producing videos and making television appearances, he has pursued an educational and environmental agenda. His struggles in the 1970s and 1980s were instrumental in the inclusion of Chapter VIII of the Brazilian Constitution (1988), which guaranteed Indigenous rights to their ancestral homelands and traditional cultures — on paper at least. He was co-author of the UNESCO proposal that led to the creation of the Serra do Espinhaço Biosphere Reserve in 2005, and remains a member of its managing committee. He was awarded the Order of Cultural Merit by the President of the Republic in 2016, and holds an honorary doctorate from the Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais. He is the author of two previous books, and was recently featured in the Netflix documentary series Guerras do Brasil.doc (Wars of Brazil).

Anthony Doyle was born in Dublin, Ireland. He holds a degree in English Literature and Philosophy and a master’s degree in Philosophy from University College Dublin. He has been living in Brazil since 2000, where he works as a freelance translator of fiction and non-fiction. He is the author of a children’s book in Portuguese entitled O Lago Secou, published by Companhia das Letras.

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Ideas to Postpone the End of the World

by Ailton Krenak,

Translated by Anthony Doyle

10/6/2020, paperback

Anansi International

SKU: 9781487008512

more info and order here

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A study released Tuesday by the Oakland Institute details an “unprecedented wave of privatization of natural resources that is underway around the world”—one that is largely being driven by the United States and its allies.

According to the progressive think tank’s report (pdf), “Driving Dispossession: The Global Push to Unlock the Economic Potential of Land”, governments around the world—particularly in developing countries—are often put under pressure by financial institutions and Western agencies to open up land for so-called “productive use” by miners, agribusiness interests, and other corporate entities intent on exploiting natural resources for profit. 

The U.S. in particular, the report says, is a “key player in an unfettered offensive to privatize land around the world.”

With deforestation and fossil fuel extraction helping to fuel the climate crisis, governments are being pushed in a direction that’s “just the opposite of the drastic shift we need to win the struggle against climate change,” Frederic Mousseau, policy director of the Oakland Institute and lead author of the report, said in a statement.

“Most of the land on our planet, especially in the Global South, is public land or land held under customary tenure systems [and] is seen as an obstacle to exploitation and economic growth,” Mousseau said.

The Oakland Institute included in its report six case studies in Ukraine, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Zambia, Papua New Guinea, and Brazil, finding that global land privatization is often directly driven by U.S. interests. 

Zambia has been affected by what the Institute calls a recent “surge of American and European startups attempting to apply blockchain technology to land registries,” referring to the digital ledger created for Bitcoin. 

The Zambian government is partnering with Medici Land Governance (MLG), a blockchain company and subsidiary of the U.S. online retailer Overstock.com, to assist with land registration and titling. According to former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, the use of blockchain “will help unlock trillions of dollars in global mineral reserves that are inaccessible due to unclear land governance systems.”

In Sri Lanka, a U.S. government entity known as the Millenium Challenge Corporation (MCC) approved a five-year compact for the country in 2019, offering the Sri Lankan government $480 million to map and digitize public lands in order to “promote land transactions that could stimulate investment and increase its use as an economic asset.”

“The proposed MCC compact would shift control of millions of hectares away from the state towards private interests,” the report says, and was proposed by a U.S. entity formed in 2002 by Congress with the stated goal of “reducing poverty through growth.”

“In practice, poverty alleviation has taken a back seat to promoting private sector growth,” the report continues. “This has translated to countries shifting their policies in adherence to a neoliberal economic framework—including the privatization and commodification of land—in exchange for substantial financial grants.”

MCC compacts throughout Africa have “allowed investors to acquire land at bargain prices to facilitate large-scale industrial agriculture at the expense of smallholder farmers,” the Oakland Institute added.

The study also points to Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s aggressive push to assume control of Indigenous territories in the Amazon Rainforest, appointing a member of one the country’s most powerful agribusiness families to head the Ministry of Agriculture. Illegal land invasions and massive fires driven by agriculture and mining interests have threatened Indigenous people while contributing to deforestation and the climate crisis. 

As the Institute published the report while the Covid-19 pandemic is upending the global economy, the report points out that “returning to normal is not an option.”

Instead, the economic crisis “must be used as a catalyst to address the systematic issues surrounding the rampant overexploitation of natural resources that has driven the climate crisis to its current state.”

Rather than erasing local governance and negating individual autonomy, governments must instead build systems that incorporate a diversity of ownership and tenure systems, and focus on a development path that serves the people instead of one that takes the land away from them for corporate profits.”

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Source: CommonDreams.org

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These crises are often portrayed in the mass media as though they are separate from one another. They have different causes and thus, they can be dealt with in isolation. However, this approach is proving itself to be inadequate, given that these crises are continuing to deteriorate, and accumulating evidence suggests that, far from being separate, these crises are linked to one another, culminating in a ‘perfect storm’.

A study published in a journal called ‘Ecological Economics’ recently suggested that human civilization is headed for an irreversible collapse as a result of unsustainable resource exploitation and the increasing stratification of society between the rich and the poor.[1] Equally alarming is a more recent study, which argued that a sixth mass extinction event is likely to occur due to human activities.[2] Furthermore,a widespread scientific consensus exists in support of the position that global climate change has been caused by human activities, as a result of fossil fuel-burning processes that release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This position has endorsements from almost 200 scientific organizations worldwide.[3]

Finite fossil fuels are heavily relied upon as a source of energy across the globe, with coal, oil and natural gas accounting for 86.9% of world primary energy consumption in 2012, whereas hydroelectricity, renewables and nuclear energy only accounted for 13.1%.[4] Even methods of energy production that appear to be more ecologically sustainable often suffer from the same drawbacks, requiring the intensive use of fossil fuels in different parts of the production process.

Climate change and energy scarcity also have a direct impact on food production. Climate change creates harsh conditions for organisms to survive, resulting in more crop failures[5] due to extreme weather, while current methods of agricultural production are heavily reliant on fossil fuels for fertilizers, pesticides, and the maintenance of global supply chains. Conventional perspectives on industrial carbon emissions in general often fail to account for emissions that occur during distributive stages of production.

A possible way of dealing with this would be to establish decentralized, participatory forms of economic organization, putting resource allocation under the democratic control of local communities. However, under the existing political and economic system, the vast majority of the population lack access to the world’s productive resources, which are instead held in the hands of a minority of statesmen and capitalists.

The depletion of finite resources such as fossil fuels, and the consequent energy and food scarcity, might owe itself to the fact that capitalism is predicated on the idea that economic growth can and should continue indefinitely. This leads to a dynamic of production for the sake of production, which, in a world of finite resources, simply cannot be sustained.

Another component of the problem is international terrorism. Because we are largely dependent on finite fossil fuels, the dominant political and economic institutions in our society have become accustomed to supporting terrorist groups, engaging in terrorism directly, or supporting totalitarian regimes. This is because doing so helps to destabilize regions, making it easier for elites to access natural resources, consequently advancing their own strategic and economic interests.

Recent years have also seen a number of state attacks on civil liberties, especially from the US government.[6] The criminalisation of whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, the signing of the National Defence Authorisation Act in 2012, and the refusal to shut down Guantanamo Bay are all reflections of a state which has become increasingly authoritarian and militaristic in its attempts to protect elites from the domestic population and prevent dissident movements from gaining traction. This tendency for greater militarisation and the maintenance of a system of US global dominance requires further exploitation of natural resources.

What seems to be the case is that far from being an aberration from an optimised global system that can be solved with minor or even major policy changes, this chain of crises seems to be occurring as a result of business as usual – so long as our political and economic system remains intact, they will continue, because it is in the interests of prevailing institutions to engage in the processes driving these crises. To quote Murray Bookchin,

To address these crises sufficiently requires meeting a certain set of conditions. Simply ‘using fossil fuels less’ doesn’t solve the problem. Any ‘solution’ that retains the idea that the earth can be treated like an inexhaustible mine merely passes the burden on to future generations. If we’re looking for a lasting solution, we need to consider what an ecologically sustainable economic system might look like, and move beyond the idea that infinite growth is a possibility. This will require something other than the capitalist system. To quote Murray Bookchin again,

With historical evidence in mind, the idea of a state-planned economy also seems out of the question. States have an inherent tendency to represent their own interests, and thus it is unsurprising that attempts to ‘replace’ capitalism with a system of central planning have failed in the past- central planning is carried out by and for central planners, merely reproducing the same hierarchies under a different name. It thus seems crucial that an anti-capitalist movement ought to take an anti-statist form, if it is the case that the state is inseparable from some form of class society.

To overcome this current ecological crisis, the Earth’s productive resources need to be placed in the custody of the community, and neither the capitalist system nor the state are fit to carry out this task. It can only be done through the free self-organisation of the masses, and the creation of non-hierarchical workplace and community federations.

Visions of a liberated, egalitarian society can’t be seen as being hundreds of years away in the distant future, because at this rate we don’t know if we’ll be around by then. The alternative needs to be created here and now, through building the new society in the shell of the old. If not now,we can only wonder if anybody will be left to contemplate the ruins in a hundred years time. Enough of illusions – the Earth’s productive resources will not be given to us from above through the gentle kindness of well-intentioned elites. If we are to survive, they must be seized from below!

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References:

[1] Safa Motesharrei, Jorge Rivas, Eugenia Kalnay; Human and Nature Dynamics (HANDY): Modeling Inequality and Use of Resources inthe Collapse or Sustainability of Societies –  http://www.sesync.org/sites/default/files/resources/motesharrei-rivas-kalnay.pdf

[2] S. L. Pimm, C. N. Jenkins,R. Abell, T. M. Brooks, J. L. Gittleman, L. N. Joppa, P. H. Raven, C. M.Roberts, J. O. Sexton; The biodiversity of species and their rates of extinction,distribution, and protection – http://www.sciencemag.org/content/344/6187/1246752.abstract

[3] State of California – Governor’s Office of Planning and Research; Scientific organisations that hold the position that climate change has been caused by human action – http://opr.ca.gov/s_listoforganizations.php

[4] BP – Statistical Review of World Energy, June 2013 – http://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/pdf/statistical-review/statistical_review_of_world_energy_2013.pdf

[5] University of Leeds – “Crop failures set to increase under climate change.” ScienceDaily – http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101007092817.htm

[6] Noam Chomsky: Obama’s Attack On Civil Liberties Has Gone Way Beyond Imagination; interview with Mike Stivers – http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/noam-chomsky-obamas-attack-civil-liberties-has-gone-way-beyond-imagination

[7] Murray Bookchin: Economics and the Moral Order; Schumacher Centre, New York, 1976 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44EPrrZAgWY

[8] Murray Bookchin: Remaking Society – Pathways To A Green Future – http://www.amazon.com/Remaking-Society-Pathways-Green-Future/dp/0896083721

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written by LSR from Edinburgh Anarchist Federation and first published at International Workers of the World / ecology section / 26 June 2014

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