Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

[Örsan Şenalp]

Dear all,

The below text, an initiative launched by Ashish Kothari, calling for
participation (to the construction of the emergence) sounds like a
reply to this discussion:


The Global Tapestry of Alternatives

The world is going through an unprecedented crisis engendered by a
dominant regime that has resulted in deepening inequalities,
increasing and new forms of deprivation, the destruction of
ecosystems, climate change, the tearing off of the social fabric and
the dispossession of all living beings with immense violence. However,
the past two decades have witnessed the emergence of an immense
variety of radical alternatives to this dominant regime and to its
roots in the capitalist, patriarchal, racist, statist, and
anthropocentric forces. These range from initiatives in specific
sectors such as sustainable and holistic agriculture, community-led
water/energy/food sovereignty, solidarity and sharing economy, worker
control of production facilities, resource/knowledge commons, and
inter-ethnic peace and harmony, to more holistic or rounded
transformations such as those being attempted by the Zapatista and the
Kurds in Rojava, to the revival of ancient traditions or the emergence
of new worldviews that re-establish humanity’s place within nature and
the values of human dignity, equality and the respect of history.

The Global Tapestry of Alternatives is an initiative seeking to create
solidarity networks and strategic alliance amongst all these
alternatives on local, regional and global levels. It starts in the
local interaction among alternatives, to gradually organize forms of
agreement at the regional, national and global scale, through diverse
and light structures, defined in each space, horizontal, democratic,
inclusive and non-centralized, using diverse local languages and other
ways of communicating. The initiative has no central structure or
control mechanisms. It spreads step by step as an ever-expanding,
complex set of tapestries, constructed by already existing communal or
collective webs, organized as alternatives to the dominant regimes,
each of them autonomously weaving itself with other such webs.

It organizes mechanisms of interaction between those regional and
national structures and with the societies, in which they exist, in
diverse languages and different means, promoting periodically
regional, national and global encounters, when the conditions allow
for them, as well as close and synergistic linkages with existing
organizations, like the World Social Forum. The Global Tapestry of
Alternatives is about creating spaces of collaboration and exchange,
in order to learn about and from each other, critically challenge each
other, offer active solidarity to each other whenever needed,
interweave the initiatives in common actions, give them visibility to
inspire other people to create their own initiatives and to go further
along existing paths or forge new ones that strengthen alternatives
wherever they are, until the point in which a critical mass of
alternative ways can create the conditions for the radical systemic
changes we need.

A small group of activists from several regions of the world started
the initiative, which community-led its structure as it takes shape in
different parts of the world. The initial group will continue
supporting the initiative as long as necessary. It has some sponsors,
who subscribe to this document and will try to weave itself with
similar initiatives around the world. Anyone interested in following
the evolution of the initiative or participate in it may write a mail
to globaltapestryofalternati...@riseup.net.

On Wed, 9 Jan 2019 at 11:18, Prem Chandavarkar  wrote:
>
>
>
> > On 05-Jan-2019, at 9:28 AM, Brian Holmes  
> > wrote:
> >
> > Maybe you are part of some such attempt? Maybe you are involved in some 
> > experiment or initiative that you could describe?
> >
>
> Brian, I am afraid I do not have a clear answer to your request, as I am 
> still early in the search.  I can talk about some dimensions of that search, 
> and started out to do so as a response to your email.  Somewhere along the 
> way, it morphed into this blog post: 
> https://medium.com/@premckar/five-philosophies-to-search-for-3dcb1aab5b3
>
> Best,
> Prem
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Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

[Prem Chandavarkar]

> On 05-Jan-2019, at 9:28 AM, Brian Holmes  wrote:
> 
> Maybe you are part of some such attempt? Maybe you are involved in some 
> experiment or initiative that you could describe? 
> 

Brian, I am afraid I do not have a clear answer to your request, as I am still 
early in the search.  I can talk about some dimensions of that search, and 
started out to do so as a response to your email.  Somewhere along the way, it 
morphed into this blog post: 
https://medium.com/@premckar/five-philosophies-to-search-for-3dcb1aab5b3

Best,
Prem
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Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

[Felix Stalder]

On 06.01.19 01:03, Florian Cramer wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 5, 2019 at 7:57 PM Brian Holmes
> mailto:bhcontinentaldr...@gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>> What we need, first of all, is a vision so carefully articulated that
>> it can become a strategy and a calculable plan.
>> Exactly that is now emergent. The point is to make it actual. That
>> means, to make it into the really existing state.
> 
> 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.

I think the two relate in interesting ways. What is emergent now is the
vision, and that does have to be decentralized, multiple,
locally-specific and spoken in many different languages. Only when this
vision is broad enough, flexible enough to resonate with different lived
realities, only then it can form the basis of a democratic politics.
Otherwise, it's Chinese style (or Thiel-envisioned) imposition from above.

But, vision is not enough (that's the take-away point from the occupy
movement outside of Spain), it must coalesce into a actual politics, so
it needs the state as centralized, or rather, collective actor. And
there is movement in this direction, around the idea of a green new deal.

So, in the new congress in the US, here is an attempt to "set up House
committee tasked with crafting, over the course of a year, a
comprehensive plan to move the U.S. away from fossil fuels by 2030."

https://theintercept.com/2018/12/05/green-new-deal-proposal-impacts/

At the moment, this is only a plan to set up a committee do develop a
plan, but it's certainly quite radical in terms of its ambition to
combine de-carbonization with a jobs program.


06.01.19 11:12, AllanInfo wrote:

> What I mean is this: where or in what way does the AS movement intersect
> with all the various/diverse forms of political insurgencies
> currently erupting in different countries? How does this relate to
> Brexit for example? Does the "Anthropocene Socialist” Movement intersect
> with DieM25 another example… Or Volt? Beyond a host of good ideas, what
> exactly is the political framework for the AS movement? Sorry to raise
> these rather practical questions but people here in Budapest are in the
> streets challenging the programme of an oppressive extreme right-wing
> government and I’ve been trying to figure out how this discussion
> relates to this ongoing struggle.

I think the case of the "gilets jaunes" is the clearest here. The
protest erupted over Macron's raising of the tax on gasoline, Diesel in
particular. The motive behind this was not entirely bad, but raising the
prices for pollution, without offering a viable alternative is just
deeply unsocial, because the rich will not feel the difference while the
suburban middle classes will see experience this as just another way in
which they get screwed by a deeply biased system. This is why simply
doing an "ecological tax reform", the classic demand of the Green
Parties of the 1990s, is no longer enough.

What is quite amazing with the "gilets jaunes", as far as I can see, and
this really speaks to the maturity of French politics, is that the deep
disaffection with the current politics it expresses, has not been
captured (yet?) by the far right. This really means there is a lot of
social energy up for grabs, available for an idea of brighter future,
that can offer both a short term answer to pressing needs, but also a
longer term vision of how live will be different, and better!, in 20
years time. At the moment, this is simply not there yet, but the green
new deal, perhaps even the commons, offers the beginning of a framework.

In terms of Diem25, Varoufakis, in a recent talk at the Oxford Union,
has pointed to the various development banks, that exists on the
international, but also the EU and national level, as existing vehicle
through which to organize such a large-scale investment program. He also
stressed that four major issues that need to be solved at the same time
by a comprehensive political action: climate change, unemployment,
public debt and migration.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWB6lY2GBjQ

It's quite clear how they relate, but taking on climate change and debt
at the same time (and they need to be addressed at the same time) means
confronting not only not only the fossil-industrial complex, but also
the core segments of the financial industry. Quite a task.




.







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Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

[AllanInfo]

Hello all,
In trying to keep track of the contours of this conversation; I seem to find it 
somehow removed from current political realities; as if the questions posed in 
this discussion, while clearly relevant to the world we live in, can be 
resolved in what seems to be a political vacuum.

What I mean is this: where or in what way does the AS movement intersect with 
all the various/diverse forms of political insurgencies currently erupting in 
different countries? How does this relate to Brexit for example? Does the 
"Anthropocene Socialist” Movement intersect with DieM25 another example… Or 
Volt? Beyond a host of good ideas, what exactly is the political framework for 
the AS movement? Sorry to raise these rather practical questions but people 
here in Budapest are in the streets challenging the programme of an oppressive 
extreme right-wing government and I’ve been trying to figure out how this 
discussion relates to this ongoing struggle.

best
allan

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Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

[nicholas]

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 > 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 
). 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, 

Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

[Brian Holmes]

On Sat, Jan 5, 2019 at 6:03 PM Florian Cramer  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). 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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Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

[Florian Cramer]

On Sat, Jan 5, 2019 at 7:57 PM Brian Holmes 
wrote:

> What we need, first of all, is a vision so carefully articulated that it
can become a strategy and a calculable plan.
> Exactly that is now emergent. The point is to make it actual. That means,
to make it into the really existing state.

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.

Here seems to lie the dilemma, if I'm not mistaken: No decentralist
politics can solve the climate change problem, since decentralization will
always produce incentives to a race to the bottom (of lowering
environmental standards/energy costs to attract capital and/or maintain
current living standards). What is realistically needed is world
governance, in order for it to be effective (more effective than the U.N.,
for example), a world government with direct authority over anything that
concerns the planet's ecology. Neither the anarchist principle of free
association, nor the liberal principle of self-interests balancing out each
other in equilibrium will work, since in the case of the planet, ecological
equilibrium cannot be gained through having opposite interests neutralize
each other, but only through common cause and action.

Such a global teleology is a scary thing. It's prone to result in
eco-fascism or eco-stalinism, with an authoritarian dictate over daily
lives. Even if one ignores the moral issues, it would be prone to power
abuse, misinformed (and therefore even ecologically counterproductive)
top-down decisions, and all the pitfalls and horrors of "wise men's states"
since Plato's Republic.

The concept of socialism creates additional complications, on top of the
above, since socialism is about social and economic justice involving
redistribution of resources. According to everything that I've read as an
amateur on the subject, including alternative economists like Niko Paech, a
global, climate-neutral lifestyle would have to (a) radically localize
production of goods, (b) radically reduce transport/distribution, (c) give
up 24/7 electricity - which, btw., would lead to the end of Internet as we
know it. (A glimpse into such a future is "Low-Tech Magazine", a website
whose editorial content covers all the issues we're discussing here on a
practical level, likely having more to say about them than Nettime:
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com . Its server runs on solar power with
regular outages, and its pages have been designed by Roel Roscam Abbing to
use only a minimum amount of kilobytes.) - Combined, factors the (a), (b)
and (c) would make socialist redistribution tricky. A world that seriously
minimizes climate change could easily produce blatant inequality (in regard
to access to resources).

Alternatively, one can draw the conclusion that Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht just
drew in an interview with the German "tageszeitung" (
https://www.taz.de/Archiv-Suche/!5559348/): "As far as evolutionary history
and cosmology are concerned, the end of our species is guaranteed anyway,
despite all the rhetorical fuss regarding the long-term survival of
mankind".

-F

On Sat, Jan 5, 2019 at 7:57 PM Brian Holmes 
wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 5, 2019 at 9:15 AM Vincent Gaulin 
> wrote:
>
> Where is the actual site of the surplus that intellectuals, protestors,
>> activists, caretakers and laborers draw upon while renovating the new
>> socialist state?
>>
>
>  Are you kidding? The problem of surplus is that there is too much of it.
> The actual site of surplus production is in largely automated mining sites,
> factories and farms around the world. An immense amount of this surplus
> goes either to the global oligarchy or to the military (US in particular).
> And the degree of automation is now rising as AI is rolled out, threatening
> a new unemployment crisis. As for the number of miners/scavengers,
> engineers, and electricians needed to create the solar field that will
> power a future society, they're all needed. Either we convert the energy
> grid to zero carbon over the next two decades or the future turns quite
> ugly indeed.
>
> The two key dangers on the horizon are mass unemployment and climate
> chaos. It's obvious to career bureaucrats and corporate planners that these
> things have to be faced. What's missing is the politics to do so.
>
> I don't think society can be remade in a utopian way where everyone
> behaves morally at a small scale of autonomous rural production. So I
> admire your cult of frugality, Vince, but I don't support it as a
> universal. Far as I can see, very few people want to give up either cities
> or the vast benefits of a global division of labor orchestrated by
> corporations and super-states. However the current configuration of 

Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

[Brian Holmes]

On Sat, Jan 5, 2019 at 9:15 AM Vincent Gaulin 
wrote:

Where is the actual site of the surplus that intellectuals, protestors,
> activists, caretakers and laborers draw upon while renovating the new
> socialist state?
>

 Are you kidding? The problem of surplus is that there is too much of it.
The actual site of surplus production is in largely automated mining sites,
factories and farms around the world. An immense amount of this surplus
goes either to the global oligarchy or to the military (US in particular).
And the degree of automation is now rising as AI is rolled out, threatening
a new unemployment crisis. As for the number of miners/scavengers,
engineers, and electricians needed to create the solar field that will
power a future society, they're all needed. Either we convert the energy
grid to zero carbon over the next two decades or the future turns quite
ugly indeed.

The two key dangers on the horizon are mass unemployment and climate chaos.
It's obvious to career bureaucrats and corporate planners that these things
have to be faced. What's missing is the politics to do so.

I don't think society can be remade in a utopian way where everyone behaves
morally at a small scale of autonomous rural production. So I admire your
cult of frugality, Vince, but I don't support it as a universal. Far as I
can see, very few people want to give up either cities or the vast benefits
of a global division of labor orchestrated by corporations and
super-states. However the current configuration of the system is deadly,
period. Collective investment on the scale of an energy grid requires a
mixed economy (say, 35% controlled by the state, as opposed to the current
23% in the US). Such an increase in the public sector offers scope for
tremendous change. First of all by the immediate offer of decent employment
for millions, and second, by the relative downscaling of production
facilitated by an alternative energy grid (distributed manufacturing).
Where the countryside is concerned, zero-carbon demands a thorough-going
transformation of the dominant mode of farming, which is now monocrops for
export - a continental-scale industrialization of the landscape. The
reversal of just some of the ecological damage caused by monocrop farming
could employ millions more people.

The tangible offer of employment is the most immediately convincing thing
that a transformed state would have to offer. A politics can be built on
the demand for such employment. It is the key to deep decarbonization. It
requires a major expropriation of wealth from both the oligarchy and the
military, and the total dismantling of the most powerful industry of all,
the fossil-fuel complex. To that extent it's a revolution, requiring
passionate majority support. But it's not the Russian Revolution, because
we do not live in an age of desperate starving peasantries. We live in an
age of excessive surplus that's toxically produced and unequally
distributed. The solution has to be at once systematic and democratic: a
new synthesis.

The first thing to build is not another solar energy or wind-turbine field
(it's already been done extensively in California and many other places,
including the roof over my head). Instead, we must create the
national-scale political desire for employment through deep
decarbonization, so as to make possible a systematic transformation of the
built environment. That kind of idea-production is not done by workers and
peasants, it's done by intellectuals, artists and activists - massive
numbers of them, because our society of relative surplus supports such
massive numbers.

What we need, first of all, is a vision so carefully articulated that it
can become a strategy and a calculable plan. Exactly that is now emergent.
The point is to make it actual. That means, to make it into the really
existing state.

onwards, Brian
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Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

[Vincent Gaulin]

On Fri, Jan 4, 2019 at 10:59 PM Brian Holmes 
wrote:

>
> The fact is, so far at least, every investment of social desire on an
> *outside* results in the immediate incorporation of that outside as an
> object for the mainstream techniques of social control. So why not desire
> an *inside*? Why not consider the core systems of contemporary society as
> the best arena in which to act? Why not go where the design power is? Why
> not desire taking over the state itself?
>

I don’t really understand what the inside/outside thing means, but I do
have some serious convictions surrounding the difficulty of taking on “big
powers” of design and state order, namely that the public has a huge gun
held to their heads, one that reads “starvation”. And then into their backs
is a knife called “status”, which is much more symbolic than literal, but
immensely powerful nonetheless. (Somewhat humorously, now, I recall as I
changed my major in undergrad from Architecture to Fine Art, going from
“getting pats on the back to being put on the prayer list.”) The weight of
these duel pressures is instantaneously felt—a truly maddening, oppressive,
and often depressive force. Our “one last chance” has to remedy the fact of
the material and social consequences of deviance.

Where is the strike fund? What do we eat? What provisions will allow rest
and recovery, and replace the old hierarchies of necessary social bearings?

In this addendum of questions, I am reminded of certain critiques within
Occupy calling for a revolution of “industriousness” who’s material,
logistical, temporic, and symbolic chains substantiate revolutions wherever
they spread. While deeply compelled by this idea, I’ve often tried to
imagine the locations and conversations that might hoist a principled
protest onto the scale of an operative state. Where is the actual site of
the surplus that intellectuals, protestors, activists, caretakers and
laborers draw upon while renovating the new socialist state? How many
socialist-convinced farmers would it take to establish the autonomy of an
anthropocene socialist campaign organization? How many miners/scavengers,
engineers, and electricians must be converted in building a wind or solar
field large enough to charge a coop of socialists’ computers?

Brian, you have argued for the merits of a party structure in orchestrating
the “state-change” we require. While “Anthropocene Socialists” has a
certain abstract charm, who might be more convinced by the “Brick and
Mortar” Party? The Democratic League of Food, Green Energy, and
Conservationist Cooperatives? The International Union of Networked Farm and
Care Workers? Trade Workers for a Dignified Minimalism? Machinists for
Collective Advantage? Democratic Alliance of Therapists, Listeners,
Ombudsmen, and the Faculty for Reconciliation?

In order to effectively understand where the rubber meets the road, we have
to meet, connect with interpersonally, and ultimately offer both a real and
socially valuable (symbolic/superstructural) autonomy to the people who
already have their hands in the existing pieces of processes that will be
reorganized and added together to form a better state (or *inside* as you
put it).

> --
*G. Vincent Gaulin*

211 Keese St.
Pendleton, SC
m. 864-247-8207
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Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

[Brian Holmes]

On Thu, Jan 3, 2019 at 1:43 AM Prem Chandavarkar  wrote:

How do we design the social, political and media institutions that will
> allow the conditions for emergence to thrive?  Our reflexivity will not
> allow these conditions to emerge spontaneously.
>

 Prem, thanks for your exquisite recap of emergence, or really, of the
social conditions for an emergent democracy, connected directly to life
experience and practice. I recall all that, and much better after your
summary. It really was a "principle of hope," the very one that supplied
the desire and energy for social media as we know it today.

I think you would be quite interested in a book called The Automatic
Society, by philosopher Bernard Stiegler. I got curious about it after your
post, and set about reading it to go deeper into the issue you raise -
namely, the question why the networked media system did not deliver on the
promise of emergent democracy. Although Stiegler doesn't focus on emergence
as such, he does offer a very detailed and far-ranging account of the way
people create social/cultural resources of care for environments that they
continually alter. These environments or "milieus" include first of all
their own productions, which are increasingly machines. Stiegler thinks
that society continually responds to the shocks created by its power to
introduce new technologies. He believes that we are presently *stupefied*
by the shock of computerized communications and big-data analytics, which
he sees as the culmination of a series of previously ill-assimilated shocks
going back to the steam engine. His particular concern is the specific
forms of exteriorized memory - writing machines, and all technologies of
registration - which, in his view, exert a fundamental influence over our
capacity to respond to technological innovation. The possibility of
generating such responses depends inherently on the configuration and use
of these memory machines (the ones that record traces of social
interaction, for example). Therefore, like yourself, Stiegler thinks they
have to be redesigned and transformed. The book is not a one-to-one
correspondence with the theory of "necessary conditions for emergence" that
you propose, but still it does deal with exactly the problems that interest
you.

Back when emergence really was the Prinzip Hoffnung of people like myself,
we were quite aware that networks of communication were both far more
controllable and far less generative than embodied communities of practice.
We tried explicitly (as I still do) to create and maintain those
communities of practice, in tandem with and as part of the development of
the Internet (conceived both as a technical object and as a locus of
culture). We knew there had to be more intimate spaces where the explosion
of knowledges and expressive possibilities brought by the network could be
translated into a consistent and sharable reflexivity, including affective
reflexivity. The whole point was a fresh exploration of what life's about
and how to emerge from the previous phase of society, dominated by
television and mass marketing. We hoped this would spread like a contagion,
a wildfire of emergence, reworking mainstream norms on an ever-broader
scale. However, exactly when targeted advertising crystallized as the
Internet business model, and big data analytics as the key to its
profitability, the enthusiasm for creating those spaces, and also for
pursuing the technical development of the Internet itself, both dried up.
The conditions of democratic emergence were preempted by the corporate
state, culminating in the truly nightmarish situation that has been
apparent to many since 2005, and has now become evident to all since the
leaks and reporting about Facebook. The redesign of interaction systems is
now an existential urgency. Without better uses of communication, no
democracy. Without democracy, no response to climate change. Anthropocene
Socialism must be democratic, as the failure of previous non-democratic
attempts has shown. It must be open to both critique and new desires, or
divergent needs. Therefore it is inseparable from the redesign of
communicational systems.

However, design itself is a social activity, indeed an enterprise, which
requires resources. It takes on an automatic character when people are
treated as manipulable objects for the accomplishment of an existing
program. Under the norms of the corporate capitalist state, such a program
is either about making profit or about imposing direct behavioral control.
The design then evolves rapidly toward a homogeneous set of procedures that
stifle desire and rebuild social interaction spaces in the form of a trap.
We have seen the speed, scope and power with which such attempts at total
makeover can be brought to fruition, this time within the intimate arena of
emergence. I do not see any way to respond by looking for some kind of
*outside*, such as "the popular" or "the poor" or "the excluded" or "the
unconscious" or "

Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

[Prem Chandavarkar]

Dear Brian,
Yes, there was great hope from emergence, and the expected results did not 
materialise.  But was that because emergence was not adequately understood, or 
was it because emergence per se is limited.  My instinct is that it is more the 
former than the latter.

Let us take the example of a termites nest, which is one of the highly cited 
examples on emergence in living systems.  The wonderful order in large termites 
nests emerges not because there is leadership in the termites, but because 
termites leave pheromone trails when they move, can sense the pattern of 
movement that has happened earlier, and have ingrained responses to place mud 
in the act of nest building based on pheromone patterns that they recognise.  
Thus one can identify the conditions for emergence as:
High-synchrony and high-frequency physical interaction
All actions and interactions leave traces
There is an impulse toward pattern recognition in the traces.
Levels of information symmetry are very high as all information is in the 
public domain
There is a low preoccupation with grand design, and the focus is on immediate 
experience and engagement
The system develops through iterative evolutionary spirals of pattern 
recognition

There was great hope when social media began to play a role in political 
struggle, the Arab Spring being a prime example.  It was felt that relatively 
leaderless revolutions and the openness of the new media laid the grounds for 
emergence.  When that did not happen, faith in emergence fell.  But an 
open-ended system of public exchanges is not necessarily emergent, for it does 
not necessarily lay the grounds for emergence.  To identify a few concerns:
Recognition: As Lawrence Lessig points out, there is a significant difference 
between recognition in physical space and cyberspace.  He cites the example of 
a pornography store.  In a physical store, if an eight-year old child walks in, 
there is immediate recognition of a problem, whereas in cyberspace this 
recognition is more problematic given the ease with which false identity and 
anonymity are possible in cyberspace.  Equally significant is the fact that the 
masks of identity and anonymity are equally available to the person who is 
doing the recognising, which is a new capability that power can now utilise.  
Lessig argues that cyberspace needs its own legal system, and one cannot merely 
extend the law of physical space into cyberspace.  But we also need to realise 
that the question of recognition is one of the most inadequately acknowledged 
questions in politics.  This dates back to the US constitution, which is held 
up often as a beacon on democracy and human rights, but failed to recognise 
either misogyny or slavery (a failing that is still to be adequately 
addressed).  And we see it now in the doctrines of neoliberalism that claims a 
form of the economy is good for everyone, but a refusal to indulge in the data 
collection and analytics that will actually measure that claim.  Without 
attention given to an inclusive politics of recognition, emergence will never 
occur.
Axes of the Social Contract:  The hope of emergence came from protest 
movements.  But protest only looks at the vertical axis between citizen and 
state.  This axis contains an asymmetry of power heavily weighted against the 
citizen.  The potential for emergence in lateral connections between citizens, 
where emergence can occur before engagement with the state, has not been 
adequately explored.
Data Trails: Emergence requires that traces of action remain in the public 
domain.  All of us are well aware of the problem here with digital data traces.
Distortions: Specific distortions are possible given the problems in 
recognition what with fake accounts, bots, and so on.  Again, not much needs to 
be said on this given the recent publicity on Russian interference in US 
elections (and no doubt, there are many other such problems that are yet to 
receive public recognition).  Emergence has largely occurred in geographically 
rooted contexts with physical interaction.  This base cannot be easily 
bypassed, and emergence in social media has to look at its connections with 
physical space, and particularly the hierarchies of scale at which physical 
space occurs, operates and evolves.  Without this connection, it is unlikely 
that emergence can happen in socio-political reform.
Flak: Chomsky and Herman, in their analysis “Manufacturing Consent”, argue that 
media remains a tool of propaganda and is not the check on the system that it 
is believed to be.  One of the factors is the ability of the system to generate 
flak that threatens the fundamentals by which media economies work. 
Manufacturing Consent was written before the era of digital media (I wonder if 
the argument has been revisited since), but the ability to generate flak is far 
far greater today.  And it is not just at the level of threatening the 
economics of media institutions, it is also at the le

Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

[Oliver Ressler]

I think this discussion on the Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" 
Movement and the quality of contributions is really amazing.


I have been involved and followed the climate justice movement for 
several years and carried out a few artistic works on it. (This cycle of 
films is the most recent one: 
http://www.ressler.at/everythings_coming_together/)


For a new project, "Barricading the Ice Sheets", I plan (among others) 
to convene a meeting of highly informed, internationally respected 
climate movement protagonists working between art and activism. Five or 
six artist-activists will be brought together to discuss the movements' 
methods, purposes, past and future in a small group setting. This group 
meeting will provide an occasion for collective thinking and unscripted 
interaction, that will result in a film and public event. The first-hand 
testimony and informed insights that result should stand in direct 
contrast to the documentary format whereby one person is interviewed in 
isolation after another. The format also reflects the ongoing importance 
of collective deliberation and speech within the movements, which 
actively contributes to form the yet unknown “coming community” that 
exceeds the current form of democracy, as we know it.


While I have already several ideas of whom to include from Europe and 
North America, I am still looking for people from the Global South 
and/or people from indigenous background who can be regarded of climate 
movement organizers and are working between art and activism.


Do people on this list have any recommendations for possible participants?

Best, Oliver





Am 31.12.18 um 11:04 schrieb nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org:

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Today's Topics:

    1. Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement
       (Morlock Elloi)
2. Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement
   (Patrice Riemens)
3. Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement (tbyfield)
4. Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement
   (Morlock Elloi)
5. Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement
   (Morlock Elloi)
6. Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement
   (Felix Stalder)


--

Message: 1
Date: Sun, 30 Dec 2018 09:09:20 -0800
From: Morlock Elloi 
To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org
Subject: Re:  Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist"
Movement
Message-ID: <5c28fbc0.3050...@gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

The problem is that this doesn't scale. Or at least the scaling model
has not been discovered. At the same time, the opposition scales pretty
well.

For this scaling to involve machines (computers, programs, networks and
such, and I cannot imagine competitive scaling not involving machines -
anyone?) another problem has to be solved, as the current crop of the
available computing machinery is heavily biased towards individualistic
outcomes. The redesign would be a major effort, as it definitely does
not consist of another 'app'. It involves interventions at the
infrastructure level, and there are $ trillions already invested in the
current one, so it's hard.

How do you motivate open door crappers to lay own fiber, grow own
silicon and use only P2P protocols with source routing? It's hard to
even imagine this.


On 12/30/18, 04:53, Keith Hart wrote:

When I grew up in Manchester after the war, solidarity was a powerful
weapon against privacy, the cult of being exclusive. We could not close
our house doors since neighbors should be free to come and go as they
please. When the men took their morning crap in the outside loos, they
left the door open to converse across the low backyard walls. After
sanitation was modernized, you could still  accidentally run into a old
lady in the bathroom who couldn't bring herself to close the door. All
bedroom doors were left open. The corner pub was our living room. When
the gas company started work with their machines outside too early, half
a dozen women would assail them on behalf of   "our street". They shut
down the machines.


----------

Message: 2
Date: Sun, 30 Dec 2018 18:45:56 +0100
From: Patrice Riemens 
To: Morlock Elloi 
Cc: nettime-l@mail.kein.org
Subject: Re:  Foundations for &q

Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

[Brian Holmes]

What matters is the remaking of social form. It's not just about inventing
a concept or revealing a contradiction. It's about contributing to shift in
what everyone shares: the built and instituted norm. Vince has challenged
the global norm of neoliberalism with a with a resolute and detailed vision
of a Green New Deal culminating in a hitherto unknown variety of
ecosocialism. His intervention is provocative to say the least, because it
starts simultaneously with the individual *and* with society.
Self-fashioning meets economic restructuring. One begins to sense a change
in the patterns of change: one begins to imagine a new way of living.

What's needed is something like an Ecosocialist Party to prefigure and
guide this metamorphosis. Otherwise it stands no chance of occurring. We
can all imagine a near future in which privileged nations and wealthy urban
enclaves are defended against the consequences of infrastructural collapse
- because that future is already happening at urban scale, with gated
communities, and at continental scale, with the armoring of US and EU
borders. What's far more difficult is tracing and walking the pathway
toward a democratic and egalitarian future. That requires concerted
aspiration, thought and action: head, heart and hands on the machines.

To make the vita nova tangible in advance, Vince says, "we must convene and
draw up some pictures." Of course I support and actively practice that
artistic proposal, but still I'd go a little further. We must participate
in deliberately constructed transnational networks that can open up to
multiple professions and interest groups, and that can also focus on
particular material conditions, shaped most commonly by national laws and
economic structures. Change in a complex society occurs when technocratic
management is disrupted and reshaped from positions outside the dominant
interest groups. Ultimately it has to coalesce into a party thing - which
doesn't mean it can't also be artistic, philosophical, religious, etc.

Vince evokes the meeting hall as the most concrete focus-point, where
bodies meet bodies to transform a community of fate. But this closeness is
either a possible future of ecosocialism fulfilled, or it's yet another
illusion of immediacy (and of that chimerical solidarity Keith Hart
protests against). In fact, it seems to me that we already convened and
drew up pictures, that was the Occupy moment: a process of emergence that
reached and recognized the limits of immediatism. What's happening on the
US left right now, in the wake of Occupy, is that scattered constituencies
are beginning to come together around the idea of a Green New Deal, which
would be a job-creating collective investment program aimed at transforming
the energy system to halt CO2 emissions and overcome technological
unemployment. I think that a real closeness, a possible coexistence of
individuals and groups on the scale of a continent, has to involve
something as thorough-going as the remaking of an energy grid, with all the
potential for literal empowerment that things like community solar,
distributed manufacturing and massive climate retrofitting can offer. I
also think that ecological restoration and an engagement with rural food
and resource producers can coexist very well with that approach.

This is a program that directly addresses the issue of scale, because it's
calling for a new figure of the continental-scale innovation system that
was activated in the US during WWII. It's a powerful synthesis that
responds to the political challenges of the nationalist right by promising
new kinds of industrial jobs and profit motives in a mixed economy, steered
but not dominated by state investment. It also contains an implicit
internationalist dimension, because it would create a new form of economic
growth whose production processes could be extended towards distressed
regions. But all of that can only be done on the basis of a political
consensus that currently does not exist, leaving the political economy
prone to resentment and the authoritarian turn. If remaking social form is
the question of the left right now, then the answer must involve aligning a
large number of different interest groups, classes and subject-positions
around this kind of scalable program. Such an alignment is currently
proceeding by way of existing institutional structures and professional
codes, and not just against them (contemporary scientific activism is the
prime but not the only example). Because of that, I don't think the
collectivist nightmare that Lucia recoils from will actually materialize.
However, I do think that social form is inherently subjective and psychic.
So a change of technology requires a change of heart, which is the really
new thing that Vince has been putting forward.

Matters of heart are also matters of class. Neoliberalism, whose primary
production processes are founded on computerized telecommunications, has
given rise to a planetary petty bourgeois

Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

[sk ye]

Hello All

I am finding this discussion very interesting. One thing I keep wondering is 
the international dimension to it. I am from the uk as are some others, and we 
are at the moment possibly shutting borders to millions (?) Once parts of the 
world become more uninhabitable, those populations will be trying to move away 
en masse. So are we needing more evenly distributed knowledge/ resources or 
people? How can we scale in that sense, so that people are more free to move 
when necessary- scaling the bounds of citizenship.

Skye


> On 31 Dec 2018, at 16:23, "nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org" 
>  wrote:
> 
> Send nettime-l mailing list submissions to
>nettime-l@mail.kein.org
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> 
> Today's Topics:
> 
>   1. Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement
>  (Vincent Gaulin)
> 
> 
> --
> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2018 10:19:18 -0500
> From: Vincent Gaulin 
> To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org
> Subject: Re:  Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist"
>Movement
> Message-ID:
>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
> 
> Brian,
> 
> If I could pick a central aspect of future life we should be aiming for it
> would be this:
> 
> Information and resources (material and time) growing closer and closer
> together, while spreading more evenly across the globe.
> 
> The great irony of internet life, of course, is that while "know-how" has
> become greatly more accessible, the means of activating it remains walled
> off by private pay walls and state-enforced property rights. Without power,
> access to information becomes an overly abstracted noise (perhaps an
> instantaneously more "meaningful" distraction from chores than say social
> media, but a distraction no less). As I say to my dad while he watches
> NOVA, "what are you going to do with all this knowledge?"
> 
> The closeness of information and material goes a long way in explaining my
> fascination with "camps". I mean, what would it take to turn a public
> university or a corporate manufacturing plant into a camp? To me, the
> provisional connotation of encampment calls to mind the de-abstracting
> effect that claiming one's autonomy would have on the economy. The brutal
> stigma of camps points to the imperative we as "makers of a compelling
> alternative" have to address: If we have a less abstract (more direct)
> structure of economic relations two (potentially troubling) things
> happen--1) on the personal scale we take more responsibility for advantages
> and mistakes we get involved in, therefore the merit of our work is more
> stark--and 2) on the global scale, our relation to ecology strikes us with
> more instantaneous force, where day-to-day circumstances like weather
> conditions bear on our immediate quality of life (this is already the
> circumstance of the global poor). In the new order, how does this more
> direct kind of responsibility not crush us? Our grappling for alternatives
> should not shy away from countering the individual stakes (whoa,
> sacrifices!) involved in greater ecological responsibility.
> 
> Brian, I don't share your pessimism that responses to climate change will
> be inevitably stalled. The main barrier to action is not recognition and
> desire to change, but rather "the cost" as defined by the status quo
> powers. Felix, here I am collapsing your four groups into three, those that
> have a large stake in the current power structure, those who have the means
> to analyze power (for better or worse), and those who want to fit in
> somehow. The vast majority that make up the latter conformists are subject
> to a tipping point, wherein a cohesive mass of attention (?30%) from
> trusted media channels motions in the direction of a new order and change
> follows. I agree with Brian that going for power through civic engagement
> makes a lot of since here, but to take it further (on the Gramsci tip?) I
> think our movement requires images of this updated "good life" as a
> necessary catalytic device. And rather than authoritarian or corporatist
> propaganda, these images must be held to a democratic process, which to me
&g

Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

[Vincent Gaulin]

Brian,

If I could pick a central aspect of future life we should be aiming for it
would be this:

Information and resources (material and time) growing closer and closer
together, while spreading more evenly across the globe.

The great irony of internet life, of course, is that while "know-how" has
become greatly more accessible, the means of activating it remains walled
off by private pay walls and state-enforced property rights. Without power,
access to information becomes an overly abstracted noise (perhaps an
instantaneously more "meaningful" distraction from chores than say social
media, but a distraction no less). As I say to my dad while he watches
NOVA, "what are you going to do with all this knowledge?"

The closeness of information and material goes a long way in explaining my
fascination with "camps". I mean, what would it take to turn a public
university or a corporate manufacturing plant into a camp? To me, the
provisional connotation of encampment calls to mind the de-abstracting
effect that claiming one's autonomy would have on the economy. The brutal
stigma of camps points to the imperative we as "makers of a compelling
alternative" have to address: If we have a less abstract (more direct)
structure of economic relations two (potentially troubling) things
happen--1) on the personal scale we take more responsibility for advantages
and mistakes we get involved in, therefore the merit of our work is more
stark--and 2) on the global scale, our relation to ecology strikes us with
more instantaneous force, where day-to-day circumstances like weather
conditions bear on our immediate quality of life (this is already the
circumstance of the global poor). In the new order, how does this more
direct kind of responsibility not crush us? Our grappling for alternatives
should not shy away from countering the individual stakes (whoa,
sacrifices!) involved in greater ecological responsibility.

Brian, I don't share your pessimism that responses to climate change will
be inevitably stalled. The main barrier to action is not recognition and
desire to change, but rather "the cost" as defined by the status quo
powers. Felix, here I am collapsing your four groups into three, those that
have a large stake in the current power structure, those who have the means
to analyze power (for better or worse), and those who want to fit in
somehow. The vast majority that make up the latter conformists are subject
to a tipping point, wherein a cohesive mass of attention (≥30%) from
trusted media channels motions in the direction of a new order and change
follows. I agree with Brian that going for power through civic engagement
makes a lot of since here, but to take it further (on the Gramsci tip?) I
think our movement requires images of this updated "good life" as a
necessary catalytic device. And rather than authoritarian or corporatist
propaganda, these images must be held to a democratic process, which to me
looks like a networked series of physical conventions. To fully answer your
question of what this more pleasant future looks like, Brian, we must
convene and draw up some pictures.

That brings me to Prem's emphasis on the physical spaces required for
"emergence". His point that [democratic?] process itself creates
alternatives couldn't be more true, but how do we claim these spaces?
Brian, this goes back to your point a few months ago about Marx's
formations, meeting with knowledgeable others in real space within that
artisan guild fraternity. Where are the guild-halls for today's
technologies? Private tradeshows? Aspen-esque festivals? Academic
conferences? Specialty book publishers? Online forums such as ours?

To ask Felix's question another way, how do we defragment these stray
channels of know-how? Is it a parasitic model like Chomsky advocates,
cleverly stealing from the powerful to sustain the insurgency? Should we
set a goal of commandeering the increasingly crowdfunded campaign funds of
the Democratic Party? Should we be busy rebooting an "occupy" movement that
goes beyond arresting our troubled institutions, but immediately
repurposing them into meeting halls for both democracy and the logistics of
info-material redistribution?

By invoking the meeting hall we take the leap of actually imaging people in
a room. Here, Lucia's concerns about the unequal stresses put on certain
individuals due to common personality dynamics come roaring to the fore. My
wife is a mental health therapist (and also an introvert). Her work
constantly makes me aware of the social strain that people with personality
disorders and other mental health concerns put on those around them. These
aggressions often flow from damaging experiences in childhood, creating
cycles of abuse, social ignorance or neglect. Pathways to self-awareness
and "treatment" are hardly straightforward. Nevertheless, I do believe
there are structural solutions for what seem like individualized traumas.
Indeed, a movement that doesn't respond to the most damn

Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

[Felix Stalder]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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








-- 
  http://felix.openflows.com
 |Open PGP   http://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=0x0bbb5b950c9ff2ac



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Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

[Morlock Elloi]

Maybe it's just me, but when I recently re-watched Easy Rider, I kept 
rooting for someone to off the f*cking hippies. The same film now has 
happy ending. It's funny how death as exit strategy lost its appeal.


On 12/30/18, 09:45, Patrice Riemens wrote:

"You do one thing" was an admonition I often heard when I lived in
India. My 'thing' I'd advise you (all?) to 'do' would be : (re)read
Bolo'bolo! (*) It's of course not _the_ (only) solution, but as a
'realistoc utopia' it does give a number of possible lines of thought &
action.

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Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

[Morlock Elloi]

The issue is not implied morality of scaling, whether it's good or bad 
(and I agree on the current modality of scaling for value extraction by 
few from the many.)


The issue is that the opposition bent on atomizing the society does 
scale, and has no moral issues with it. The concentrated capital 
invested a lot in it, and has laid its hyphae, from server farms via 
enormous infrastructure (of fiber and terminating devices,) directly 
into brains of the rabble, supplanting social impulses with simulacrum, 
cutting lateral ties with others and routing everything through the 
modulating center.


I don't see how isolated colonies (of open door crappers) can prevail or 
even thrive, when faced with the planet-sized fungal organism. They will 
be eaten and digested. Which is exactly what is happening today. If they 
do not scale (and in your words, roughly, become their own enemy) what 
can they do but die? Because you can't take knife to a gun fight. This 
battle is lost. Look around. Knives do not work. There is no better 
knife, which seems to be the sole focus of the so-called 'progressive 
community'. They are like stamp collectors - benign.


Can open door crappers scale and not become their enemy? Is the hatred 
of guns so great that death is better? This is starting to look as a 
psychiatric problem.


m.



On 12/30/18, 10:27, tbyfield wrote:

I think that's worth noting, because instead of casting scaling as an
intrinsic quality of some *thing*, the capacity to scale, it shifts our
attention to the environment in which that scaling is said to take
place. So, basically, it's the capacity to monopolize.


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Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

[tbyfield]

'Scaling' is a strange idea. It can be used to describe mom-and-pop 
efforts to grow some product line or whatever, but it has a more 
important usage that's much more ideological — as in VC efforts to 
identify potential unicorns. In that sense, it's invoked as though its 
meaning is self-evident and its force is inevitable, like a sort of 
abstract manifest destiny — which, of course, is exactly what it is. 
It doesn't have a Wikipedia entry, FWIW, just a disambiguation page that 
points to a bunch of detailed uses. When you unpack it a bit, it amounts 
to something a bit less sexy-sounding, like: 'deliberately designed to 
maximally exploit arbitrary resources as quickly as possible without 
regard for the consequences.' So, on a certain level, it's kissing 
cousins with the idea of conspiracy, mostly distinguished from that by 
its technocratic garb and avoidance of morality. I think that's worth 
noting, because instead of casting scaling as an intrinsic quality of 
some *thing*, the capacity to scale, it shifts our attention to the 
environment in which that scaling is said to take place. So, basically, 
it's the capacity to monopolize.


It's more complicated than that, of course. I've pieced together parts 
of a history of the idea, and it's pretty interesting. If the idea 
sounds heroic and inevitable, that's mostly compensation: it arose from 
conflict and it aims to stave off chaos. It's a very Apollonian idea, 
you could say. That's why it's so bad at beginnings ('deliberately 
designed to') and ends ('without regard for the consequences').


Cheers,
Ted

On 30 Dec 2018, at 12:09, Morlock Elloi wrote:

The problem is that this doesn't scale. Or at least the scaling model 
has not been discovered. At the same time, the opposition scales 
pretty well.


For this scaling to involve machines (computers, programs, networks 
and such, and I cannot imagine competitive scaling not involving 
machines - anyone?) another problem has to be solved, as the current 
crop of the available computing machinery is heavily biased towards 
individualistic outcomes. The redesign would be a major effort, as it 
definitely does not consist of another 'app'. It involves 
interventions at the infrastructure level, and there are $ trillions 
already invested in the current one, so it's hard.


How do you motivate open door crappers to lay own fiber, grow own 
silicon and use only P2P protocols with source routing? It's hard to 
even imagine this.

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Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

[Patrice Riemens]

Grüzi Mittenand,

"You do one thing" was an admonition I often heard when I lived in 
India. My 'thing' I'd advise you (all?) to 'do' would be : (re)read 
Bolo'bolo! (*) It's of course not _the_ (only) solution, but as a 
'realistoc utopia' it does give a number of possible lines of thought & 
action.


'Gute Rutsch' to All! May 2019 be as enjoyable as it will be 
interesting!

p+7D!

(*) https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/p-m-bolo-bolo



On 2018-12-30 18:09, Morlock Elloi wrote:

The problem is that this doesn't scale. Or at least the scaling model
has not been discovered. At the same time, the opposition scales
pretty well.

For this scaling to involve machines (computers, programs, networks
and such, and I cannot imagine competitive scaling not involving
machines - anyone?) another problem has to be solved, as the current
crop of the available computing machinery is heavily biased towards
individualistic outcomes. The redesign would be a major effort, as it
definitely does not consist of another 'app'. It involves
interventions at the infrastructure level, and there are $ trillions
already invested in the current one, so it's hard.

How do you motivate open door crappers to lay own fiber, grow own
silicon and use only P2P protocols with source routing? It's hard to
even imagine this.


On 12/30/18, 04:53, Keith Hart wrote:

When I grew up in Manchester after the war, solidarity was a powerful
weapon against privacy, the cult of being exclusive. We could not 
close

our house doors since neighbors should be free to come and go as they
please. When the men took their morning crap in the outside loos, they
left the door open to converse across the low backyard walls. After
sanitation was modernized, you could still  accidentally run into a 
old

lady in the bathroom who couldn't bring herself to close the door. All
bedroom doors were left open. The corner pub was our living room. When
the gas company started work with their machines outside too early, 
half

a dozen women would assail them on behalf of   "our street". They shut
down the machines.

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Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

[Morlock Elloi]

The problem is that this doesn't scale. Or at least the scaling model 
has not been discovered. At the same time, the opposition scales pretty 
well.


For this scaling to involve machines (computers, programs, networks and 
such, and I cannot imagine competitive scaling not involving machines - 
anyone?) another problem has to be solved, as the current crop of the 
available computing machinery is heavily biased towards individualistic 
outcomes. The redesign would be a major effort, as it definitely does 
not consist of another 'app'. It involves interventions at the 
infrastructure level, and there are $ trillions already invested in the 
current one, so it's hard.


How do you motivate open door crappers to lay own fiber, grow own 
silicon and use only P2P protocols with source routing? It's hard to 
even imagine this.



On 12/30/18, 04:53, Keith Hart wrote:

When I grew up in Manchester after the war, solidarity was a powerful
weapon against privacy, the cult of being exclusive. We could not close
our house doors since neighbors should be free to come and go as they
please. When the men took their morning crap in the outside loos, they
left the door open to converse across the low backyard walls. After
sanitation was modernized, you could still  accidentally run into a old
lady in the bathroom who couldn't bring herself to close the door. All
bedroom doors were left open. The corner pub was our living room. When
the gas company started work with their machines outside too early, half
a dozen women would assail them on behalf of   "our street". They shut
down the machines.

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Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

[newmedia]

Brian:
> However, emergence on its own appears useless as a principle of hope.
Good point.  Allow me to amplify . . . 

"Emergence"was a DoD project.  Or, more properly a DoE one.  The US Department 
of Energy (spun-off from DoD to "control" nuclear weapons), established the 
Mecca of "emergence" at the Santa Fe Institute (across the road from Los Alamos 
and staffed with bomb designers), to take the techniques of "star design" and 
apply them to society.  The DoE still funds $10M/year to the Institute (about 
1/2 its budget.)

And while we're on the subject, the recently established "Cultural Evolution 
Society" -- devoted to "nudging" whatever emerges -- was initiated at an iARPA 
workshop at the UofMaryland where they explicitly said that DoD funding would 
block many participants so they would need Templeton and others to "sheep-dip" 
the process . . . !!

https://culturalevolutionsociety.org/

"Complexity theory" is a poor substitute for *causality* -- adopted from 
astro-physics, in which "probability" has replaced any understanding of "why" 
-- and actually has had *zero* success in the social domain.  If you want to 
deal with "strategy" (which is the business of my Center), then you will have 
to retrieve causality (and forget "emergence").  Otherwise, there is indeed no 
"principle of hope."

Judea Pearl, famous for his contributions to AI research (as well as the death 
of his journalist son), has written an important book titled "The Book of Why?" 
 In it he recounts how we lost "causality" and why we need to get it back -- 
alas, without answering his own urgent questions (or really understanding *why* 
all this happened in the first place.)

https://www.amazon.com/Book-Why-Science-Cause-Effect/dp/046509760X

Happy New Year!!
MarkJersey City Heights#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
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Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

[Keith Hart]

Dear Felix,

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

I have learned a lot from living in Paris for over two decades, especially
from the recent renaissance of economic sociology and institutional
economics here. I have hung out with European and Latin American activists
who drew me into the alter-globalization movement launched in Porto Alegre
in 2001. I met you and likewise gained greatly from our civilized
interaction and friendship, as I have from Brian, Alex and others on
nettime and in person. But -- there has to be a but -- I believe that there
is one crippling intellectual impediment above all others that undermines
political initiatives generated in this network. It is the belief that more
solidarity can fix excessive individualism.

When I grew up in Manchester after the war, solidarity was a powerful
weapon against privacy, the cult of being exclusive. We could  not close
our house doors since neighbors should be free to come and go as they
please. When the men took their morning crap in the outside loos, they left
the door open to converse across the low backyard walls. After sanitation
was modernized, you could still  accidentally run into a old lady in the
bathroom who couldn't bring herself to close the door. All bedroom doors
were left open. The corner pub was our living room. When the gas company
started work with their machines outside too early, half a dozen women
would assail them on behalf of   "our street". They shut down the machines.
When United scored a goal, the combined shouts of 50,000 men cowed the
women and children left behind like a hundred bull roarers in a New Guinea
village.

By the 90s, having lived mainly in Britain, North America, West Africa and
the Caribbean, I was convinced that solidarity in that form of concrete
class solidarity was now gone forever. To my joy, living in Paris proved
that I was wrong. The republican tradition of manifestation, of street
protests, was alive and well. It was not for nothing that France gave us
society and solidarity, England economic individualism, Germany philosophy
and history, and America democratic revolution. But scratch the surface and
it gets more complicated -- the English are profoundly conformist, the
Americans even more so and I have never come across a people as
individualistic as the French. Look at their intersections jammed at rush
hour, the way they bust into queues, their behavior at supermarket
checkouts.

All this is preamble, a phantasmagoria in Benjamin's terms. To get serious,
I have to go back to Durkheim and Mauss. French social thinkers around 1900
blamed it all on Herbert Spencer. Market economy was an English invention
(with some help from Adam Smith) and incurably individualistic, a premise
taken to evolutionist extremes by Spencer's social Darwinism. When Talcott
Parsons wrote The structure of social action (1937), he began by asking who
killed Herbert Spencer and how? His answer was Durkheim, Weber, Pareto and
Alfred Marshall (yes, the synthesizer of marginalist economics and
Keynes'teacher).

Emile Durkheim, in The Division of Labor in Society (1893) and his nephew
Marcel Mauss in The Gift (1925) and extensive political writings insisted
that markets were social (the non-contractual element in the individual
contract) and that humanity is homo duplex --both individual and social (or
democracy must reconcile freedom and equality according to Tocqueville).
Bourgeois ideology everywhere contrasts individualism and society, as
Spencer did. In this the left as usual reproduces the dogma of its
capitalist opponents. Mauss was a cooperative socialist, active in the
French Section of the International Workers party (SFIO) and a close friend
of Sidney and Beatrice Webb who, with Marshall and others, led the Fabian
wing of the Labour Party. They aimed for consumer democracy building on the
solidarity and individualism of existing capitalist societies, through
coops, unions and mutual insurance.

Fair trade isn't just helping poor foreign farmers. It offers feel good
shopping for bobos. If neoliberalism promotes "hyper-individuality" and
"weak ties", it does so by doping the masses with the academic social
sciences as a smokescreen for its own strategy for carving up the world as
a plutocracy. Ensuring that capital flows freely everywhere is a
coordinated social strategy. Why else would the US have 25 % of the world's
prisoners, most of the world's weapons and the internet corporations who
sabotage our ability to make society? When the corporations claim to be
people like you and me in order to benefit from human rights laws, while
unlike us retaining limited liability for debt, they combine individualism
and global power in ways t

Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

[Brian Holmes]

On Sat, Dec 29, 2018 at 11:29 PM Prem Chandavarkar 
wrote:

we need to think about the spaces where engagement will happen: engagement
> that drives widespread reflection on who we are as a society and who we
> want to be, and leave the question of social models rather open.  How do we
> seed these spaces? How do we scale them? The question of where these spaces
> are is more important than what they will produce.
>

Prem, how good to hear from you. I wish you well for the upcoming year.

Concerning emergence, alas, it was the great idea of the 1990s and early
2000s, which a large number of networked political movements took as their
"principle of hope" (to quote Ernst Bloch). The keyword of that whole
period, for social movements, was "self-organization," which we hoped would
revitalize democracy by overcoming the structural devices of social
control. But strategic moves by large-scale actors proved to be enough to
dissipate emergent attempts to spark social reflection. This became
devastatingly clear at the moment of the global street protests against the
impending Iraq invasion in 2003, which were just brushed aside by the
American state. Later in 2005, during the self-organized protests against
the G8 in Geneagles, Scotland, a terrorist attack in the London underground
focused all media attention and made the protest movements simply vanish
from public awareness. Emergence had been "pre-empted," to use another of
the keywords from that time.

Nowadays I continue to find the theories of emergence valuable, as a better
description of how innovation takes place within and alongside complex
organizations. But it seems that emergent phenomena can be analyzed
statistically, and once their composition and properties are more or less
known, large-scale actors (state or corporate) can reshape the conditions
of emergence in order to reassert social control. It is precisely because I
lived through this experience that I have returned to asking questions
about the state and civil society. It seems clear that major changes of
course require the alignment of institutional priorities and the
coordinated exercise of both coercion and incentivization. Emergent
phenomena remain marginal, even insignificant, without access to the
modernist techniques of social steering. And so the great innovative
question, "How to dissolve state power?" has been set aside, in favor of
the dauntingly traditional one: "How to take state power?"

The current thread takes the US conditions as an example, but there could
be many others and everyone is free to chip in on the basis of their local
or regional situation. The whole world is at a turning point, due to the
consolidation of oligarchical control over the global political economy and
the contradictory need to replace fossil fuels, which have been the literal
power-source of capitalism over the last two centuries. Practically
everywhere in the developed world one sees the influence of a popular
nostalgia for twentieth-century industrial prosperity, with all its
attendant hierarchies and oppressions - a nostalgia instrumentalized by
neo-authoritarian political forces. These forces have been startlingly
effective over the last few years, but people are now mobilizing against
them.

The theory of emergence can help one to spot new social phenomena in statu
nascendi, and in that sense, your focus on where reflection and engagement
begin to happen is quite valuable. I agree, asking where social innovation
happens, and attending to exactly what is heppening there, is a necessary
starting point. However, emergence on its own appears useless as a
principle of hope. And so is any return to the strategies and
organizational forms of the 1930s. New social and ecological ideals are
effectively emerging. This discussion is about identifying them, and
simultaneously, looking ahead to find ways of implementing them in reality.
Concepts such as "vision" and "model" - or for that matter, "strategy" -
may appear constrictive by comparison to the molecular ferment of emergent
behavior, but if you want to see any implementation at scale, they remain
crucial. How to share a vision? How to embody a model? How to carry out a
strategy? I think the future hangs in the balance of those questions.

best, Brian
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Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

[Prem Chandavarkar]

To find our way by constructing a vision of an alternative society may be 
counterproductive. Living systems (and that includes society) are emergent: 
defining ‘emergence’ as the capacity of a system to display at its core 
fundamental properties that cannot be found in an earlier state of the system.  
For emergence to operate the focus should be on the depth, intensity and 
inclusivity of immediate engagement between components of the system, rather 
than a desired final state of the system.  In fact, the focus on a final state 
may destabilise immediate engagement. As Steven Johnson observes in his book on 
emergence, our brains function as emergent systems, and that emergence would 
collapse if each neuron sought to be individually sentient.  Emergence evolves 
iteratively through an impulse toward pattern recognition in the routines of 
daily engagement.

So we need to think about the spaces where engagement will happen: engagement 
that drives widespread reflection on who we are as a society and who we want to 
be, and leave the question of social models rather open.  How do we seed these 
spaces? How do we scale them? The question of where these spaces are is more 
important than what they will produce. And the ideal of the Enlightenment model 
of the social contract, which we tend to assume is still valid, is actually not 
so, and perhaps never was so.

Further thoughts at:
https://link.medium.com/isnoWnZL3S

Best,
Prem

Sent from my iPad

> On 28-Dec-2018, at 12:41 AM, Brian Holmes  
> wrote:
> 
> Vincent Gaulin wrote:
> 
> "I want to suggest that our "intellectualizing" actually step up to the facts 
> of existence, i.e. "How do we live vs. how will we live?""
> 
> Vince, I'm fascinated with your post and I'd like to hear more. You're 
> thankful for the work done by the New Deal in your grandparents' day. You 
> speak about a spartan minimalism that pulls away from consumerist excess. You 
> long for a collectivist discipline whose most obvious model is the army. 
> These are sweeping and powerful concerns. I can't get behind the army part, 
> but I admire the risk you took in writing about it, and I see where you're 
> headed - namely, toward a substantial transformation of the social order, in 
> order to address inequality and climate chaos. The question is, how to change 
> life concretely? How to imagine that process at national scale? How to 
> participate in it?
> 
> Here's the thing: there will not be any full-scale infrastructural response 
> to climate change until the situation gets considerably worse. It will take 
> multiple cities getting slammed by hurricane or flood or drought in order for 
> that to begin. However we can see the road ahead, and it starts with the 
> issues around inequality. Inequality is already dramatic, and as time goes 
> by, it will be increasingly clear that the decline of empire and the 
> breakdown of ecological balances impact people very differently depending on 
> their income, their race and their location. As the climate crisis 
> intensifies, economic and environmental justice will become the same issue, 
> IF the ground has been adequately prepared for that convergence. If there is 
> no such preparation, then we will get climate solutions for the rich alone, 
> and failed attempts to cure inequality by rebooting the 1950s industrial 
> economy. The latter is already underway and you can see what a dead end that 
> is.
> 
> So what's to be done is to generate new aspirations, new ideas of the good 
> life, and initial models for putting them into practice at local or regional 
> scale. Please notice, I am NOT talking about individual models - because as 
> much good as that can do is already being done. Instead it's about imagining 
> a transformed government, and a new, more intricate relation between state 
> and civil society. Inequality will be a big driver for this, especially as AI 
> starts kicking in and more and more people lose their jobs, or never succeed 
> in getting one. Flood control, drought response and the relocation of 
> populations will require major collective investments - and here, collective 
> means some level of what is called the state. Anthropocene Socialism will 
> emerge pragmatically, as an increasingly mixed economy, with the state 
> handling problems on a scale that no individual or corporation can address, 
> from medical care to clean energy provision to river management, and let's 
> not forget the geoengineering, because it will be needed at planetary scale. 
> But it's crucial that this mixed economy be democratic. Otherwise we will 
> just get repeats of the kind of failure that centrally planned, authoritarian 
> communist states produced in the twentieth century.
> 
> Are the models of the 1930s useful for moves in this direction? On the one 
> hand, yes: because the New Deal is still in living memory, it's still 
> inscribed in contemporary institutions and on the land itself, and it forms a 
> referenc

Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

[Felix Stalder]

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first phase of the political fight is about group I against group
III and IV. At the moment, group I is winning

Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement (Brian Holmes and Vincent Gaulin)

[Morlock Elloi]

Isn't this like going to shrink to cure the discomfort of belonging to 
the not-ruling class and get sedated, instead of looking for a pitchfork?


Are we at the point where problems are framed as caused by cosmic rays 
and weltschmerz, and need some primordial nurturing to 'heal', the 
'situation' being so complex, unfathomable and requiring conferences to 
discuss and ensuing papers to cite? Plus this metaphysical bs. of 
relegating everything to the 'climate change' monster, the new Rapture 
for progressives.


Pathetic and impotent.

Where the f*ck are the communists on nettime?

Instead of vacuous ruminations try wearing a magnetic bracelet. It may 
work. Hard to get a grant for it, though.





I must admit that talk of collectivist camps and ascetic material
minimalism gives me pause, unless you are talking about short-term work
for the unemployed as in the New Deal, and unless it is voluntary. It’s
not just that, short of another Great Depression, I suspect that this
vision may not be attractive to most Americans raised in a culture of
excess and (a distorted) individualism, but also that my own experience
as an activist makes it less than attractive.

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Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement (Brian Holmes and Vincent Gaulin)

[Lucia Sommer]

When I read a thread that includes FDR’s New Deal, utopian collectivism,
and psychological disorders as part of a serious discussion of the current
crisis and attempts not only to imagine alternatives but ways we might
begin to prepare the ground to actualize them, I dare imagine that
“think[ing] outside the box” isn’t just a slogan of the digital mind
control corporations. So, thank you, Vince and Brian.


I don’t want in any way to quash fearless thinking, and I agree with Brian
that Vince’s comments represent just that. So I’ll throw these thoughts out
in the sprit of experimentation with imagined alternatives, rather than
disagreement per se:


I must admit that talk of collectivist camps and ascetic material
minimalism gives me pause, unless you are talking about short-term work for
the unemployed as in the New Deal, and unless it is voluntary. It’s not
just that, short of another Great Depression, I suspect that this vision
may not be attractive to most Americans raised in a culture of excess and
(a distorted) individualism, but also that my own experience as an activist
makes it less than attractive.


Lots of people are experimenting with intentional communities, but they’re
not for everyone. I’ve lived in and around several such communities and
co-ops of activists, and while I found them inspiring in many ways, I could
only live that way short-term. The main reason being that, as one on the
introverted end of the spectrum, I found them oppressively social. I
couldn’t work and organize all day and then interface with that number of
people constantly in my living environment.


Also, as one raised by a parent with a personality disorder, I have little
tolerance for the sort of narcissistic destructiveness and social
dysfunction they produce. Given that this personality type now seems
endemic in our society (embodied by the American commander-in-chief), I
find nonsocial, or minimally social, space even more necessary. I mention
this not because my experience is unique but rather because I think it is
common. Hence much of the appeal of dominant consumerist narratives of
designing or renovating the perfect nuclear family home, retiring to the
countryside to escape the stress of modern society, or isolated “cocooning”
with Netflix. We can’t ignore the appeal of these narratives if we hope to
produce alternatives that are compelling to large numbers of people.


Is it possible that anarchist and socialist (and perhaps even “dropout
culture”) visions of community, in attempting to counter the isolation of
bourgeois and modern (particularly suburban) life, overcompensated toward
too much togetherness? Could they reflect a particularly American
overvaluation of extroversion? And/or residues of socialist and communist
state cultures, wherein any sort of interiority or space for thinking was a
threat to authoritarian control? In any case, I think that interiority is
undervalued in our current culture and yet allowing for, or producing space
for, interiority is necessary for any sort of creativity, and for the
production of truly alternative and experimental theory and practice.


Having said that, Vince’s thoughts on alternative communities brought to
mind recent acknowledgements from within the psychological establishment
about the failures of our mental health system’s biochemical models, and
also suggested possibilities for engaging that discussion.


The linked article below is an extract from Johann Hari’s new book, *Lost
Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected
Solutions, *rethinking the decades-long failure to treat depression and
anxiety with pharmaceuticals, and exploring instead social and political
remedies for addressing them. It’s just one of many recent books on this
subject and seems representative of a crisis that may constitute an opening:


https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jan/07/is-everything-you-think-you-know-about-depression-wrong-johann-hari-lost-connections


With pessimism and hope,


Lucia Sommer




On Thu, Dec 27, 2018 at 2:15 PM  wrote:

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Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

[Brian Holmes]

Vincent Gaulin wrote:

"I want to suggest that our "intellectualizing" actually step up to the
facts of existence, i.e. "How do we live vs. how will we live?""

Vince, I'm fascinated with your post and I'd like to hear more. You're
thankful for the work done by the New Deal in your grandparents' day. You
speak about a spartan minimalism that pulls away from consumerist excess.
You long for a collectivist discipline whose most obvious model is the
army. These are sweeping and powerful concerns. I can't get behind the army
part, but I admire the risk you took in writing about it, and I see where
you're headed - namely, toward a substantial transformation of the social
order, in order to address inequality and climate chaos. The question is,
how to change life concretely? How to imagine that process at national
scale? How to participate in it?

Here's the thing: there will not be any full-scale infrastructural response
to climate change until the situation gets considerably worse. It will take
multiple cities getting slammed by hurricane or flood or drought in order
for that to begin. However we can see the road ahead, and it starts with
the issues around inequality. Inequality is already dramatic, and as time
goes by, it will be increasingly clear that the decline of empire and the
breakdown of ecological balances impact people very differently depending
on their income, their race and their location. As the climate crisis
intensifies, economic and environmental justice will become the same issue,
IF the ground has been adequately prepared for that convergence. If there
is no such preparation, then we will get climate solutions for the rich
alone, and failed attempts to cure inequality by rebooting the 1950s
industrial economy. The latter is already underway and you can see what a
dead end that is.

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

Are the models of the 1930s useful for moves in this direction? On the one
hand, yes: because the New Deal is still in living memory, it's still
inscribed in contemporary institutions and on the land itself, and it forms
a reference point that can be easily shared, as Bernie Sanders has been
proving for years. But society has changed tremendously since then,
particularly because there is so much more material wealth, to the point
where the problem is less scarcity than mismanaged excess. Also we have a
very idealized view of the New Deal: we don't see the huge conflicts it
produced and we don't see the gap between wealthy cities and impoverished
countryside that was such an obstacle for the Roosevelt crew (for example,
those brilliant Farm Services Adminstration photos were urgently necessary
to convince people in the cities that there really *was* a structural
problem with the national economy). We could also learn a lot from the
successses and failures of racial integration in that period. Above all, we
don't see how all the gains of the New Deal were twisted into something
very different by the war, which was the only thing that could provide the
motivation and the consensus for a total makeover of society. I have
written about that dead-end here: http://threecrises.org/passive-revolution.
The interesting thing is, climate change provides a challenge on the scale
of world war, but it will not take an industrial build-up to overcome it,
quite to the contrary.

Now is the time to start thinking seriously about all these things. The
thinking has to be done by intellectuals in the broad, Gramscian sense -
that is, by people who occupy directive positions at any scale in society.
For Gramsci, a neighborhood organizer is an organic intellectual, and so is
an artist or someone working in the HR department of a big corporation. To
change society, these and many others have to find a

Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement

[Vincent Gaulin]

Sun, Dec 9, 8:10 PM, Brian Holmes wrote:



the first institutional form we need is a discursive one capable of
admitting, thematizing and discussing the intertwined nature of the
economic and the ecological dead-end we are now in. ...
I don't think we will ever get the Ministry of Climate Change Economy
without some version of the Anthropocene Socialist party. That's my vote
for the most urgent institutional invention: a fundamentally discursive
formation, able to integrate members from across society, and oriented
entirely toward political action.

I'm struggling to understand the infrastructure of building this kind of
political movement. I agree that understanding the mess we are in is part
of a solution, but one important lesson from FDR's New Deal is the power of
literally showing up on people's doorstep with resources and material
advantages to offer. A movement like that has to ask and answer “how we
live” on a nuts and bolts, brick and mortar level.

In rural, mountain South Carolina where I grew up and now live, the land
was wrecked by cotton monoculture and the forests decimated by logging.
Local folks lived in a near no-cash economy. The majority of homes and
communities lacked electricity and plumbing. These are the conditions my
grandparents grew up in (They are still alive!). WPA and Conservation Corps
Camps brought infrastructure projects that have forever impacted lives so
deep that it can still be seen in the landscape itself. The Appalachian
forests were replanted by hand, although they are now taken as "natural",
and the land in almost every suburban development still carries the shape
of the terraces that the New Deal laid out over rural farms. These
interventions met people where they were, offering advantage and
convenience on a huge scale.

And yet disturbingly, even these powerful interventions rest on the double
catastrophes of economic instability (the Great Depression) and global war.
Borrowing a conclusion from Thomas Picketty, there has been little impetus
for widespread conversion of capital from wealth to material-and-labor
outside of massive violence (note the refusal to call this state change in
capital "investment"). Without the need of proverbial meat (social
reproduction) for the meat-grinders of global industry and massive
bloodshed, the lower classes find it impossible to qualify for the "credit"
they need to manifest their own autonomy. And nowadays with increasing
financialization and automation, accreditation slips further away still. Of
course I'm saying nothing new here, just pointing to the same unprecedented
historical imperative we face in a shift away from global violence. With so
little evidence at hand, what means do we have to convince a global public
that anything less than a zero-sum game of global domination precipitates
local advantage?

An anthropocene socialism has to lay out different measures for quality of
life AND individual power, decoupled from war, authoritarian corporate
structures, racism and patriarchy--the historical fertilizers of violence.
In my view, this begins with a dignified cult of minimalism, a democratized
reigning in of consumerism gone mad, centering on the common basics of
life. The military has historically provided its conscripts with a crash
course in minimalism. And anyone who has ever lived through poverty
understands how remarkably few things one needs to survive. By whatever we
propose as a solution, the survivors of Capitalism's long and punishing
economy must be affirmed in their resilience, and in tandem, the upper and
middle classes must have a ready means to humble their material
circumstances without the threat of personal defeat or outright
humiliation. (Here, we can redirect the high esteem military service holds
within impoverished and populist circles toward a mass movement detached
from global violence.)

It comes at no surprise then that FDR accomplished much of what he did in
the Conservation Corps through a network of rural encampments. What is
missing from a lot of the current discourse is that mass movements require
a literal institution of living together. And in turn must, those
institutions must provide justice in their forms of power, education,
discipline, freedoms, and rehabilitation. Far from "intentional
communities," broad conscription into networks of compulsory barracks lays
out the demands of socialization equally and horizontally. This is the
platform for mass democratization, de-sexing social reproductive work and
emotional labor, as well as renovating responses to criminality by
implementing therapeutic and rehabilitation programs. Furthermore, mass
conscription works against the calcified polarization between rural and
urban folks.

The work of camps is self-sustaining through it's minimalism, and from that
foundation it attends the common needs of society and ecology--agricultural
production, conservation, ecological rehabilitation; medicine, fitness, and
child, elder, and differently-ab