Normally I find myself agreeing with Brian’s posts, so its an odd
feeling to be at odds with your recent ones. When Vincent wrote ‘where
is the surplus’ I didn’t take that as meaning where is the kit, plans
(of which there are endless shelves), materials and people, but where is
the power. What is it that people can draw on to create change. If
anything the disconnect between the immense wealth (and immense
pollution) generated by Capital and the global surplus population
hammers home the question: how are we to take the two and create change.
Often there are dismissals of ‘local’, small or immediate scales (that
society can’t be made in a utopian way as you write), followed by calls
for either state action or a global leviathan - both as old as the first
campaigns against climate change (and, as Doreen Massey noted, part of a
logic of globalisation where the global creates the local as an
impoverished and powerless scale). I’d suggest the global political
scale imagined as necessary is really less than that - it is a
technocratic artefact born from a particular way of seeing the world,
one that comes from how we ‘see’ climate change. Scaling is a misleading
concept - while climate change is a planetary problem, this does not
require a global solution, or even a singular solution.
There are a myriad of scales, sites, and networks between the nation and
the individual household. There are endless possibilities for change.
Tackling the principle corporate actors would be a good start. Building
on the power of those actors who the nation-state often responds to and
tries to contain with tame reforms - from activist, community and
indigenous groups to trade unions and NGOs - would be another approach.
Not merely to put pressure on government, but to start to go in, against
and critically beyond the state. Ways of life must be changed, most for
the better, but what needs to change will be radically different from
place to place around the world.
Government has failed systematically for decades now. People have been
calling for the creation - or emergence - of movements to put pressure
on the nation-state for just as long. I don’t think change must begin
with nation-states. I think if anything the obsession within
environmental circles with the nation-state stems more from a lack of
faith in our collective capacities to self-organise than any sense that
taking over the nation-state is any real solution. Reaching for the
magic state button won’t help at this point. Do we really think we have
the time to build these movements, get into power, work through the muck
of governmental mechanisms, then implement policies and legislation? We
are past that slow march. We need plans, and sites of struggle, but they
have to be at other scales at this point imho. This doesn’t mean not
engaging in forms of governance (particularly at regional and city
levels), nor not aiming to shape policy and governance. It does mean not
making the nation-state and global governance the focus of any radical
anthropocene politics.
nicholas
On 06/01/2019 03:44, Brian Holmes wrote:
On Sat, Jan 5, 2019 at 6:03 PM Florian Cramer <flrnc...@gmail.com
<mailto:flrnc...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Your wording is interesting, because it connects "emergence" with
the "state". Since the classical concept of emergence evolved
around self-organization, it was decentralist. The state is a
(more or less) centralist concept. The way you put it, it sounds
as if you didn't have one particular state in mind, but a global
concept of statehood that can enact global policies.
Well, I must not put it very clearly then. I think it should begin
with national states. I mostly speak about the US, because I am a
citizen and because the US is big enough to set production standards
and exert technological and organizational leadership. This would be
of enormous benefit to all other countries that are trying to
decarbonize. But mind you, Germany's efforts, self-contradictory as
they are, have already been of great benefit. China, too, can set
production standards, but it's totally undemocratic, a bad pathway in
my view, at least for the so-called West.
De facto world governance is multilateralism. It's exerted on a
case-by-case basis, mostly as needed for global interoperability
issues (for example, air-traffic control, see icao.int
<http://icao.int>). Multilateral agreements are crucial to climate
change policy, witness Kyoto, Paris, etc: I would not suggest throwing
those out. But they cannot be expected to work before some large
nations provide viable examples. As for de jure world government, it
appears impossible either politically or even militarily. There was a
big push for it after WWII and it failed.
When I say the desire to change the energy grid is emergent, it just
means that very many people are thinking about it, forming
organizations, pushing for laws, exploring technical inventions,
forging concepts and metrics, etc. The point is to make those things
into national policy. Multilateralism will follow. The physics of
dissipative structures tells us that emergent behavior precedes a
phase change: "order out of chaos," to quote the title of a great
book. Many complexity theorists have adopted that notion. I frequently
used it to talk about the crystallization of a new techno-economic
paradigm after a major crisis (it actually happened after 2008 in
China, but not yet in Euro-America). I think that the physics language
is only metaphorical though.
Gumbrecht's characterization of Trump as an "impulse-driven activist
without a world-picture" is perfect, but his conclusion--basically,
"well, we are cooked anyway"--is both lamentable and irrelevant. As
the world heats up, actions will be taken. Of course there is no
guarantee whatsoever about which actions, with which results. The way
I see it, the "we are cooked" position just leaves intellectuals some
free time before the beginning of massive interstate conflict over
climate-change consequences, which will clearly happen under a
business-as-usual scenario. In the meantime they can enjoy the news
from the southern borders, where piecemeal carnage is already going
on. Such a position is undignified. It demands that I destroy in my
own self so many ideals, principles, norms, psychic constructs,
affects - I just can't do it. Life would lose its savor. Far better to
work towards better outcomes.
Actually I find the website that runs intermittently on solar power
much more enjoyable than the Spiegel article, thank you!
best, Brian
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