On Tue, Mar 5, 2019 at 4:40 PM Sebastian Stein <busha...@gmx.de> wrote:
"What role would this new conception of nature after nature and the ensuing ideas of humanness as part of and enmeshed with non-humanness play in the forming of an Anthropocene Socialist Movement?" Dear Sebastian - Thanks, your comments are great and I'm curious to hear more. Also totally cool what Vincent says: An alienated division of labor has produced the ecological mess that's now to be remade by Anthropocene Socialism. I don't know where calls in the US for a "Green New Deal" will go, but for me, a cultural transformation of the objectifying relation to nature is the basis for a state politics that can deeply rework the energy/labor system, and thereby come to grips with climate change and other ruptures of the planetary boundaries. I think this has to go as far as producing a state, because that's the scale of organization that's missing to the left. Nonetheless, my work now is about producing the kind of culture that would underlie and generate this new form of state, in the same way that civil society was needed for the proper functioning of the state in the old democratic theory. The concept of Anthropocene is useful, because it overcomes the idea of a seperate "pristine nature" that can always be despoiled and then considered worthless. Instead, the Anthropocene indicates a planetary ecological relation of which the human population is an integral part - and currently, a radically destabilizing, dangerous, alienated part. "Gaia theory," another name for earth systems science, is clear about all that. The conclusion most people draw is that we must take responsibility for all we do as a species, and struggle to discover how the development / de-growth of global civilization can restore a viable dynamics of the earth system. "Viable" also has to mean viable for human beings, with an economy, with all the problems of politics, and with a need for disalienating socialism rather than the current oligarchy. All those things are implicit in the idea of Anthropocene Socialism - because it's clear that the most dangerous and destabilizing factor in the earth system today is capitalism, unchecked capitalist growth, capitalist domination over humans and non-humans. It's possible to get closer to the goal by means of another concept, which is the bioregional state. Whenever the needs and future flourishing of non-human beings are taken into account in political negociation, then you have another emergent element of a bioregional state. The regional part matters, because if the biota themselves are political subjects, then the old boundaries aren't right, you have to understand different economies within different borders for different ends: you have to think and to act on the question of what is a bioregion, and for whom it is a bioregion. These are key questions in our approach to the Parana Delta. As Alejandro Meitin says: "Who designs territories? And for whom are they designed?" A bioregional state is emergent all over the world to some degree, but awareness of the Sixth Global Extinction is making this awareness much more urgent and much more palpable, at the same time as extractivist capitalism is attacking these emergent elements throughout the Western Hemisphere, and maybe everywhere. So a tragic awareness marks the present, but it must be so, because tragedy splits you open and makes it possible to start changing your orientation, to start thinking and feeling cosmologically, and to start creating new collective institutions on that basis. For me, the cosmos in question is the living planet, the biogeochemical cycles. Our current social form, the neoliberal corporate state, is really destroying the existing cycles, it's driving the whole planet out of the Holocene, into a violent and tumultuous transition. The idea is to live that transition, to take it on, to steer it somehow. Okay, no one knows if this is possible, but there is only one way to find out. You know, one of the antecedents of the Parana project was called "Watersheds as Laboratories of Governance." Vince puts it perfectly: "An adequate political framing of responsible action, on every scale from selves inside ourselves to global orders, and also importantly, a roadmap to institutionalizing responsible authorities, mustn't privilege the organizer/manager/designer's function over the work of witnessing and caring for (life-giving) processes." So, cooperative multispecies culture is the basis for a movement toward Anthropocene Socialism. Let's talk more about it, Brian
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