| Sean Cubitt on Wed, 25 Nov 2020 01:33:47 +0100 (CET) |
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| Re: <nettime> [EXT] Re: Thoughts on coups |
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War: is already the de facto result of climate change in what used to be the Fertile Crescent. Trump damn near made it an issue of war on the Mexican border. If Australia wasn't a federation, its states would be at war over the selling off of the Murray Darling
river system's water. And the pyrocene is entrenched in Australia.
There used to be a sour joke: There are Irish nationalists, Welsh Nationalists, Scottish nationalists and... English Greens. Like anarcho-fascists (Dominic Cummings, late of Downing Street, was just such a right-wing situationist), green-nationalists are equally
revanchist.
Crutzen and Stoermer closed their 2000 proposal for the term 'Anthropocene' thus:
'An exciting, but also difficult and daunting task lies ahead of the global research and engineering community to guide mankind towards global, sustainable, environmental management'
Geoengineering by a class of scientists (shades of HG Wells' Shape of Things to Come') may be as risky as scientists running nuclear programs. Tho maybe Wells also had something smart
behind his aeronautical Übermenschen - world government. There's a good history of the UN that uses the Victorian poet Tenison's lofty vision of The Parliament of Man for its title - the gender is clearly out; but so is the speciesism. Rancière argues that
politics occurs when the excluded demand a part in their governance - a demand that changes government permanently (as women and ex-slaves have done already). It is unthinkable that oceans and mountains should have a seat in government, just as it was unthinkable
for women - and still is unthinkable for migrants - to have a say in how they are governed. The unthinkable has to be thought.
Eco-socialism yes - but only if the 'social' is rethought - and re-practiced - no longer exclusively as human: The Commons is a better phrase, common land, general intellect (including
those forms it takes when congealed into machines and infrastructures). We could start with that absurd contradiction 'intellectual property' - commons as peer-to-peer ecology/economy may start from undoing at least property as core concept of western Enlightenment.
That this implies undoing the 'proper' as the principle of individualism is one way to recognise where anarchism belongs to capital and when it doesn't
Think local, act global
s
Sean Cubitt | He/Him
Professor of Screen Studies
School of Culture and Communication W104 John Medley Building University of Melbourne Grattan Street Victoria 3010 AUSTRALIA
New Book: Anecdotal Evidence https://global.oup.com/academic/product/anecdotal-evidence-9780190065720?lang=en&cc=au# From: Brian Holmes <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, 25 November 2020 10:29 AM To: Sean Cubitt <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected] <[email protected]> Subject: [EXT] Re: <nettime> Thoughts on coups
This is for certain, because the only alternative to opening borders - and at the same time, engaging in co-development strategies that allow some people, at least, to remain where they are - is war plain and simple. Climate change is going to translate
into burnt crops, forced migration and war long before rising seas drive people out of lower Manhattan. And state collapse induced by neoliberalism will do the same. The current political economy is a vicious circle getting worse, 2020 has sure made that clear!
The question I have, is how to build an effective alliance of the excluded, one that does not become a wrecking ball in its own right?
A lot of anarchism is now doing the work of neoliberalism, it's heavily nihilistic. Autonomism itself was an uneasy fusion, anarcho-communism, but the communist part was gradually reduced to a kind of fantasy for intellectuals whose real politics were
anarchist by default - not their own default, but because every attempt to construct a state-for-the-multitudes was foreclosed. In the absence of a constructive principle you get alienated people looking to accelerate the breakdown, on both right and left
btw. The US is rampant with that kind of accelerationist now - in fact, on the extreme right they describe themselves with that exact word.
I think we need an eco-state. I mean a form of social coordination that doesn't precipitate collapse, but protects against, reverses the trends, allows human and ecological healing. Of course you can imagine an eco-state in an authoritarian vein, because
that's where China is going. Rana Dasgupta surely sees it differently - I'm looking forward to read that text - but I see China going toward a state that will internalize earth system imperatives, and actually respond to the climate crisis by producing self-driving
electric cars, total surveillance and geoengineering. Geoengineering is good - or at least, it's inevitable - but authoritarianism isn't. How should the Western countries and their "integrated peripheries" respond? What can civil-society movements do about
it? The answer is, we don't have a clue. Shame on us. Mexico is collapsing, and white people in the US think they can bring back the good old days.
As for the carbon tax that someone mentioned, I hear you, but it's too little too late. It might have helped twenty years ago, if it hadn't been just another neoliberal ploy for gaming the system. It can still do some good, in a more serious form, but
now we're on a timeline that's going to require central coordination in addition to market coordination. Unless we just want civilizational breakdown in the megafires of the Pyrocene. Which is really coming into its own in Colorado, by the way. I'm afraid
it will put a real dent in the tourist industry.
Green New Deal or bust. I'm not kidding when I talk about eco-socialism. The question is how to get there.
Brian
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