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-abled care; industrial manufacturing; housing, transport, and trade-craft; and network communication (especially in the forms of mass education, live entertainment, and public conventions). Each subsection of attention must have stations for routine, maintenance, and experimentation, wherein agents of day-to-day routine can plan, test, and counsel improvements to their methods. Do the camps continually bridge back to established forms of urbanism, or does a premise arise for a kind of modern nomadism? How do formal and informal processes layer to create synergetic responses to dynamic and seasonal collective needs? Apprehension toward this kind of broad utopian reorganization is warranted, given the real historical examples of socialist and communist revolutions gamed by corporatist and/or authoritarian power, as well as the interpersonal problems of "toxic personalities", personality disorders, and face-to-face dominance in day to day life. However, this is why I and others find the success of the New Deal such a compelling model to build upon. Now feminist and racial justice initiatives must be brought to bear on the socialist renaissance. My point in trying to bring all the brokenness of contemporary life within a single utopian frame is to highlight the interconnectedness of these problems across the political, interpersonal, and ecological realms. 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?" It is our job to make a compelling case for a more straightforward, dignified, and satisfying way of life and work as an integrated public. Then if these demands become popular, we will have a better chance of arresting and redistributing the 1%'s vast stockpiles of wealth and political power. With seriousness and optimism, Vince -- *G. Vincent Gaulin* Pendleton, SC m. 864-247-8207
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