Re: <nettime> Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement (Brian H

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

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Today's Topics:

1. Re: Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist" Movement
(Brian Holmes)

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Message: 1
Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2018 13:11:01 -0600
From: Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>
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Subject: Re: <nettime> Foundations for "Anthropocene Socialist"
Movement
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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 consensus gameplan,
which is not easy to do. We're failing radically as a matter of fact. The
different fractions of the left are inhibited by anarchist idealism on the
one hand, and on the other, by an outdated socialist idealism buried in the
imagery of the New Deal. I doubt the future will bear much resemblance to
either of these idealizations.

But let's go further with all this, Vince. Talk about the future as you
foresee it. The point is to try to create new and more positive roles, for
oneself first of all. I've been at it for about the last five years, and
I'm glad to say that although such a position is not yet mainstream, I
don't feel alone. Anthropocene Socialism is coming. It just needs a lot of
help with the arrival plan.

best, Brian

On Fri, Dec 21, 2018 at 8:57 AM Vincent Gaulin <gvincentgaulinjr@gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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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