| 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: Prem Sent from my iPad 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 Sun, Dec 9, 8:10 PM, Brian Holmes wrote:
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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 GaulinPendleton, SC
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