At Geocritique, we’re excited to host Arun Saldanha’s work-in-progress, “Some principles of geocommunism.” To be frank, it’s hard to know what to make of this piece, and this is a good thing. Part axiomatic, part manifesto, and entirely provocative, “Some principles of geocommunism” resists convention, while entreating its reader to critically re-evaluate the manifold socio-economic conditions of environmental crisis and to entertain the possibilities of a communism-to-come. Though we all have different ways than Arun of reading Marxism, poststructuralism, and the so-called nonhuman turn, we feel this piece will provoke responses relevant to the objectives of Geocritique. Arun emphasizes “Some principles of geocommunism” is a snapshot of his rapidly evolving theoretical framework, but its eclecticism means that discussing the gaps, weaknesses and ambivalence will be helpful to many people working on similar themes. Accordingly, at Geocritique we feel Arun’s piece calls for a mode of engagement that transcends fixations on sole authorship, and instead invites critical, reflective, and spirited conversation about what geocommunism might mean for 21st century environmental politics, and most importantly, how its principles might be put to work.
*Public commenting on “Some principles of geocommunism” will be open from July 23rd to August 13th.
Some principles of geocommunism
July 2013
Concentration of CO2 has hit 400 ppm. The economic crisis has from the start been an opportunity for an entrenchment of the economic power of the global elite. Hiding their oxymoronic status, green capitalism, ethical consumerism and geo-engineering are convincing everyone ecological disaster can be averted. In the face of the apocalypse it predicts, science remains at worst corrupt and at best spineless, while the left remains hindered by humanist conceptions of political agency. Not the modern city or the nation-state, but the Anthropocene is now the horizon of revolutionary politics.
What follows are theoretical principles. Unlike in 1848 or 1917 there is no spectre of communism haunting any country. No concrete strategies to take over power can be formulated. A belief communism can be revived for the twenty-first century is nonetheless stirring in some academic and activist circles. An understanding that capitalism does not work is widespread. There is an appetite for revolution and experiment. And there is a historical resurgence of apocalyptic imaginations. These currents – anticapitalism, revolution, apocalypse – are now to be pushed to the point where their complicity with liberal democracy cedes to a properly communist project. The prefix geo is necessary to signal both a break with nineteenth- and twentieth-century communism, and that it is the Anthropocene itself that has inaugurated the desirability of a new mode of production.
Geocommunism consists in politicising science, denaturalising Marxism, minimising humanism, secularising eschatology, collectivising Stoicism and eternalising revolution.
1 Politicising science
1.1 The Anthropocene has to be posited as the material and theoretical ground of any concept of social justice. The combat for justice starts with four facts: 1) resources are per definition finite, 2) the earth system has been irrevocably altered by human production, 3) positive feedback loops under capital are accelerating severe perturbations to ecosystems, 4) humans are in the last instance evolutionary entities at risk of starvation, disease and brutality. Scientists predicting half of humanity will perish by 2100 are already proposing fascist responses to these four facts. This is why a prior consideration of deep time is essential for communist theorising.
1.2 Science and environmentalism have to be confronted with their ideological blindness to the true cause of climate change: the capitalist mode of production. Humans have always had drastic effects on ecosystems, even as hunter-gatherers, but agriculture then industrialisation were the key thresholds increasing the species’ footprint. Over the last two centuries the exponential increase in deforestation, resource extraction, greenhouse gas emissions and waste have to be blamed on one thing only: the unstoppable need of money to increase itself within a competitive environment. The already tangible effects of climate change indicate that the sixth massive extinction event in earth history could conceivably include the end of the human species. Not greed, not mastery of nature or Cartesian dualism, but the inhuman self-augmenting force of capital is the cause of so-called ecocide.
1.3 The Anthropocene will never be blessed with abundance for all, as both orthodox communists and green-liberal economists hope. Peak oil and the finitude of rare earths are only the most obvious indications that scarcity is the future’s objective imperative. Malthus has so far been overwhelmingly used to justify capitalist arrangements and bourgeois morality. But his pessimistic view of destructive positive feedback loops can be politicised into the opposite political direction once it is conceded selfish consumption amongst the rich and the middle-classes is the problem, never the multiplication of the poor. When scaled up to the entire planet Malthus prescribes not only general austerity, that is, the end of commodity fetishism, but global deindustrialisation, absolute economic equality and free basic services for all. Ecological footprints can be made benign by keeping minerals and fossil fuels in the ground. A global demographic transition follows automatically from equality. Abundance will be spiritual not material, of culture and pleasure not of goods.
1.4 Capitalism’s delirious love for computers will have to come to an end. As Mao said, the human capacity for debating, inventing and assembling is more important than any technology. A Hippocratic oath regulating all science, design and engineering, not just medicine, will entail that every purely technological fix for mending catastrophe is exposed as serving narrow interests. The only fix capable of averting barbarism is a full-blown change in the mode of production. This change will certainly benefit from computers and satellite communication, but simultaneously give these entirely new functions.
1.5 Its potential to drastically change the course of terrestrial life means only one thing for science: it has to shed its juvenile belief in detached objectivity. Most present-day science is fundamentally skewed and dishonest by virtue of being literally bought and prescribed by corporate and geopolitical interests. The dedication of Hippocrates to rigour and serving the people was far more accomplished than the rat race for patents and fame we see today. Still, science, especially geology, is becoming increasingly aware of environmental injustices and the likelihood of catastrophe. But science has yet to become reflexive about its own maintenance of the economic inequalities which make it possible. Only in making justice and critical thinking part of their rational vocation are the sciences properly scientific, that is, at odds with money, common sense and dogma. For this conversations with Marxism and psychoanalysis are indispensable.
2 Denaturalising Marxism
2.1 Marx inherited the nature-culture split of German Idealism and Neoplatonic Christianity. While in Hegel the march of the human spirit progressively emancipates itself from nature, historical materialism conceives production and emancipation as necessarily involving nature, but its notion of nature still remains largely idealist (exterior, static, calculable), therefore ambiguous about the place of humans ‘within’ it. Through this Hegelian concept of nature Marxism has on the whole allowed bourgeois philosophy to formulate what evolutionary theory means to the moral and epistemological terrain. The implications for philosophy of Darwin (and Lyell) are at least equal to those of Kant, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. The disdain for biology among Marxists indicates they are not ready to think about ending the capitalist mode of production. They are not thinking about the question: how will ten billion humans live equitably on this planet?
2.2 Like Man and God, Nature has to be jettisoned categorically. The main connotations of the term – essence, what lies absolutely outside the human, obeying immutable laws, pure and sublime, encompassing everything, harmonious – are all ideological cement in capital’s destructive ecology. When used in environmentalism and Marxism, including the Frankfurt School and ecosocialism, the monolithic abstraction of the term prevents understanding the precise ways capital unleashes ecosystemic disaster and environmental injustice. Any casting of a realm of Nature outside the human prevents building a new mode of production generating equality from within the complexities of biophysical systems.
2.3 The scientificity of Marxism must be reinstated after the necessary attacks on positivism and realism. While empiricism has indeed been a bourgeois ideology there is nothing in the scientific method itself that blocks a communist stance, as Lenin and Engels argued. A minimal positivism has to be invented which retains the utopian universalism of Comte and the Vienna Circle. By subtracting the links positivism has had with nationalism (Brazil) and industrialism (Japan), the unification and diffusion of science is put at the service of egalitarian society. This full politicisation of science is the partial solution to the question what constitutes the legitimacy of revolutionary authority. The geocommunist vanguard leads social formations into another mode of production largely based on the trust its scientists gain amongst the people, who are educated to understand the collective movement towards equality, and who critique the vanguard where it does not act in the global interest.
2.4 Communism has to fully accept humans are vulnerable and unpredictable biophysical systems, albeit ones which can become conscious of their destiny as Kant and Hegel say. Communism has to embrace the ontological implications of complex systems and human evolution, now usually ideologically rightwing. Getting rid of its metaphysical concept of nature Marxism can start grafting its categories onto biological and physical concepts such as force, entropy, population, emergence, event, uncertainty, endosymbiosis, toxicity, threshold and bottleneck.
2.5 A fully materialist position has the same ontology subtending its politics and its science: the future of the Anthropocene requires thinking their claims to universality together. Deleuze and Guattari came closest to providing such an ontology, but they landed too close to anarchism. Their ontology, together with the failures of communist industrialisation and social engineering, constitute the starting point for conceiving geocommunist positivism.
Science without politics is empty: under the generalised Hippocratic oath, and firmly against the situation of the last centuries, the only reason to subsidise research is to challenge inherited knowledge and bring lasting global equality. Critical scientific thinking includes dealing with those moments where science contradicts current political beliefs (there can be no party line in science). Politics without science is blind: revolutionary planning decisions bump into demographic and ecosystemic limits if they are not informed by rigorous research and debate. Science and politics together, however, are nothing without philosophy distinguishing them. A fully materialist position requires that philosophy is not an exchange of ideas amongst the few but affects all the spaces to be transformed into a communist mode of production.
3 Minimal humanism
3.1 Hegemonic Western humanism believes firmly in the progress of knowledge, technology and colonisation. The implications for the rest of life have been an afterthought. The ecology of global capitalism has for some four centuries been intrinsically racist, making white populations live longer and better at the expense of the toil and suffering of others. Humanitarian campaigns after ‘natural’ disasters in the South (the 2010 Haiti earthquake), disasters which will become routine if capitalism goes on as it does, are the clearest example of the continuing racist hypocrisy underneath Western humanism. For the truly rational humanist response to such disasters is to prevent them, to change the economic structure making brown and black populations die in disproportionately large numbers where extreme weather, drought or earthquakes strike. As activists point out, places suffering most from climate change have contributed least to carbon emissions. The Anthropocene is in itself a racist biopolitical reality.
3.2 Geocommunism follows in the footsteps of the antihumanist tendency in French structuralism. Not man, but impersonal systems, ideologies, the earth itself, are the object of truth practices. The true sciences of the human – that is, Marxism and psychoanalysis as reformulated after Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault and Althusser – are structuralist and deal with pattern and rupture at the level of abstract virtual structures. Clearly consumer capitalism thrives on humanist themes like wholesomeness, pity and personality. However, structuralism ultimately retains of humanism the incapability to think the human as self-destructive terrestrial force, because it too continues thinking within a pre-Darwinian, idealist ontological framework.
3.3 Humanism becomes reactionary when it decries the inauthenticity of technology or urban society. Critiques of alienation, the rape of Gaia and so on are often crypto-fascist. What should be critiqued instead is how both technological optimism and many celebrations of place are complicit with the capitalist system, and how they obscure the socio-ecological exploitations they are based on. Psychoanalysis is central to combating the New Age and touristic platitudes of place and community. Desire is per definition alienating, enigmatic and violent. Human instincts are not simply about self-preservation, as can be seen in commodity fetishism and the many neuroses and psychoses of capitalism. Psychoanalysis is also important for examining the proliferation of fears under the Anthropocene and for debunking the fantasies behind geo-engineering and similar autistic capitalist solutions to climate change. Minimal humanism derives from psychoanalysis a definition of truth that is not objectivist but cryptic, interpersonal, retroactive and subversive.
3.4 Humanisms are conceivable which develop and celebrate human capacities as aberrant and vulnerable not central to the physical universe. Geocommunism retains three minimal tenets of the Greco-Roman and Renaissance humanist legacy: universality, secularism and optimism.
The latent universality of the human species – all humans think and speak – is an empirical truism. It is as an animal capable of choosing a just future that humanity is a site of universality. Though populations are extremely unevenly related to the Anthropocene and almost all imaginations of human unity on ‘spaceship Earth’ are implicitly racist, the Anthropocene does raise the unprecedented question of who will take responsibility for ensuring the conditions of survival of all other humans henceforth. The hope for (bio)diversity, community, rights to indigenous way of life, and specifically feminine values cannot withstand the universalising onslaught of capital, and has to be replaced by a combative project for global environmental justice.
Such militant humanism is strengthened through debate about the meaning of man, woman and evil in the universe amongst all the philosophical and cosmological traditions capable of such debate: monotheistic, Central-African, Meso-American, Hindu, Chinese, etc. This debate aims not at ecumenical respect for diversity of viewpoints but the rigorous development of a world after capitalist destruction.
3.5 Renaissance humanism emerged together with mathematical physics and anticlericalism, an insistence on scientific reasoning indispensable for geocommunist universalism. Literacy and intellectual pursuits have to be defended against current obsessions with indigeneity and corporeality: nonmodern cosmologies should hekp to displace capitalist subjectivity, not provide another New Age genre. An unabashed bibliophilia is essential to abort the increasingly dogmatic screen-mediated stupidity working so well for global capital. Knowledge production has to be decoupled from profit, war, gadgetry and all its racist and masculinist limitations.
3.6 What has to be retained from humanism is finally quite simply the conviction humans are worth their salvation. The fashionable nihilism that fantasises the universe comes to its unintended fruition with the demise of civilisation or consciousness is but a narcissistic fascination with one’s own lyrical description of the decadent end, lacking courage to do much about it. Politically such aestheticism implies either the formation of fascistoid groupuscules or mass suicide. Geocommunism has to face and explain its pessimism about the near future, but optimistically affirms its longterm objectives as feasible.
4 Secular eschatology
4.1 Philosophy of history has to be revived after the necessary demystifications of its whiteness, masculinity and linear progressivism. The Anthropocene forces upon us a fundamental rethinking of the question whether there is a direction and purpose to the universe, the question of teleology. Philosophy has rarely considered human extinction, delegating the topic to religion. Was the destructibility of man’s home part of God’s plan? Is intelligent life mere accident? Or is there an ubiquitous tendency towards selforganisation which came to an apex in the geniuses of quantum physics? Geocommunism resists all vitalism and holds that the physical universe is absolutely devoid of prior purpose. But no intrinsic direction does not mean no direction at all. All organisms actively transform their environments. A minimal humanism holds that humans are exceptionally adept at imbuing environments with purpose. The material existence of humans propels them to create their destiny, which means they can also quite easily prepare for unmentionable evil and their own extinction.
4.2 Hegel foresaw a metaphysical, non-chronological end of history, the pinnacle of his idealist system when the collective human spirit completely understands itself, freed from natural and cultural contingencies, and contributes in full consciousness to the commonwealth whose laws and values it has itself created. This end-point is no static transcendent mystical goal but already exists wherever spirit makes real progress towards universality, changing together with the historical trajectory towards it. Hegel’s teleology is a call to history-making. It inspired generation after generation to contemplate an inexorable direction in world history towards emancipation. Geocommunism shares the pessimism of the late Kant: it is more probable that capital and war will put an end to history together with human life itself. But this final cataclysmic possibility also means the maturation of the conditions of possibility for an end of history in the Hegelian sense. While humans possess an ineradicable propensity to evil, and communism does not have any objective intrinsic necessity, the challenge is to make the future demonstrate communism had been necessary all along.
4.3 Geocommunism reformulates the notion of teleology on the level of politics, not life or history: teleology as self-fulfilling political prophecy. The goal of human existence is posited as universal justice, but it is utterly contingent on the collective responsibility and working towards it. Hegel and Kant might have understood our planetary crisis as a strange unexpected confirmation of the final possibility of moral universalisation and the becoming conscious of spirit, albeit via its exteriority, nature. With much of the future of the biosphere in its hands it is indeed as if the human evolved for the sole purpose of deciding about the planet’s development. However, it is not spirit or judgment in general but always particular powerful institutions and groups that decide. Reinventing teleology is understanding the power relations within the species, the weight of the movement towards universal emancipation weighing in on every ecological decision. Future catastrophe will remember today’s selfish and stupid decisions.
4.4 Marxist theory has had its messianic, shamanic and other quasi-religious moments, but its Enlightenment background makes it ignorant about extinction. The End is becoming a polemical and cinematic focus more than it was during the Cold War. This is creating few big ideas on the left. Geocommunism will take full advantage of the contradictions within the alarmist affects and narratives that will certainly proliferate in the society of the spectacle. Terror about the world coming to an end is already used for pushing capital and war. If followed up with reason and a sense of justice, however, fear leads to embracing a different economy: how on earth could capitalism honestly propose any solution to the crises it causes?
4.5 Apocalypse (revelation) is becoming a secularised concept. It is a central critical concept in geocommunism, formulated through science and politics though inescapably inspired by various eschatological traditions (Christian, Hindu, Aztec, Tupi). Secularising the concept means that what is revealed in the end-times is the unspeakable horror of human, not divine, agency. The Anthropocene is the possibility – the option – of a minority of selfish humans ordering the gradual extinction of the human species as a whole and many other species with it. Understanding the socio-ecological tendencies towards such annihilation automatically reveals communism as the only pathway to retain the biosphere’s carrying capacity for the human species.
4.6 Secular eschatology is from the start formulated in the name of all humans, and therefore vast swaths of the biosphere. Communist borrowings from religion – chiefly Judaism and Christianity, occasionally indigenous cosmologies – are understandable in a situation where big ideas are needed, but this can thwart the universalism needed for the Anthropocene, which is as colourless as capital and will soon no longer be dominated by the European Union and the United States. Religion’s model of redemption is anthropocentric and operates through spirit(s), while real salvation will happen through material practices. The long day of judgement will consist not so much of punishing past sins as rendering the evils of increasing greenhouse gases, racism, war, patriarchy, landfills, acidification, etc. progressively impossible.
5 Stoic collectivism
5.1 Stoicism is a philosophical system particular to European Antiquity but geocommunism assumes it is a universal cultural tendency. Forerunners of minimal non-anthropocentric humanism, both the Stoics and the Epicureans theorise virtue in the name of the cosmic order. Ethics derives from physics, somehow. For Asian philosophies too, becoming properly human means cultivating the whole universe’s tendencies towards accord and generativity. However necessary, Kant’s absolutely human morality flounders where biophysical crisis forces it to substantiate itself. If the most accomplished moralists (Roman Stoic and Confucian) use virtue ultimately to stabilise empire, communist virtue is expressly revolutionary. Today Stoicism consists in committing to the long-term dismantling of the capitalist mode of production, precisely because it is crazily violating every aspect of ethics and physics. Because climate change is evil incarnated, virtue can only be geocommunist.
5.2 Stoicism is not grim but cheerful about the innate duty towards life. It teaches us how to die: without regretting missed opportunities to creatively contribute to the collective future. Socrates was jolly till the end (more so than Jesus). Stoicism does not prohibit enjoyment, only the neurotic and paranoid kinds, underanalysed by Epicureans. The Anthropocene commands a new valuation of the various ascetic traditions, ushering in general indignation about possession and accumulation, something Christianity failed to achieve. True lasting pleasure is derived from developing ‘the simple life’, one centred on benevolence, reason, health and feeling at home with strangers and constant biophysical peril (cosmopolitanism). Unlike deep ecology and Marxist humanism, Stoicism joins a movement of universalisation out from the zone of human comfort. It consists of the self-disciplining reinforcement of an obscure yet certain destiny of justice, given to it by the rest of the earth. Stoicism’s concern is not the flourishing of individuality nor the warmth of community or holistic ecosystem, but the constant rising up to the challenge that the next day may be one’s last.
5.3 Its friendliness to science does not mean geocommunism is naturalist or reductionist. It refuses to define a lost originary human nature, true use-value or ‘real needs’. Human social formations respond to drives (sex, hunger, vocalisation, excretion, fear, stupor) found in other animals, but these drives are contradictory. Racism, addiction and greedy calculation thrive on instinct, and will resurface in future communist society. But irrational generosity and miscegenation are equally instinctual. Asceticism includes the becoming conscious of an animal’s propensities to selfishness and self-destructive violence. As Buddhism teaches, relinquishing the habituation to ego and property is self-liberation before it is sacrifice. Human biology is fully capable of pushing generosity away from its hypocritical pious modes towards a lasting collectivist horizon.
5.4 Geocommunism is a very-long-term project to bring everyone to the same level not of the current Global North’s middle-classes, but the South’s proletariat. Everyday resilience in slums, refugee camps and so-called failed states (Congo) shows how maximal value can be obtained from minimal supply of resources and services. The global wealth gap is to be crossed the other way, therefore, which will initially consist of huge sacrifices for the North. Another theological concept, sacrifice is to become secularised, de-nationalised and de-individualised. The eventual result is that all humans have the material comfort, cultural opportunities and environmental footprint slightly above the average Cuban household today.
Expropriation and collectivisation occur systematically through state institutions and science-based planning and debate. The rich (first the rich countries collectively, then the rich in every country) understand they are not only giving back what was never theirs but securing the survival of future generations. Given the momentum of avarice and cynicism under capitalism, coercion in this massive expropriation project seems unavoidable. Learning Stoicism, however, the rich will understand a sacrificial attitude follows both logically and affectively from impending doom. They will understand that the sacrifice of financial power and overconsumption under the Anthropocene illuminates the human propensity to saintliness more than any moment in history.
5.5 Nation-states dissolve into a global federation of dense cities counting one to ten million and governed by the principle of subsidiarity. Large wilderness areas between these cities are left uninhabited, starting with today’s fragile ecosystems. All energy comes from renewables, all waste is recycled. Agriculture is done within and close to urban areas, manufacturing is a steel. Labour exists only for the common good: three days of work a week suffice, retirement can be taken at forty. Housing, health care, education, arts, sports, transport are free. So are electricity and water, but they are severely limited compared to today. Medicine no longer aims at prolonging some lives desperately while letting others barely start: seventy years of creative living will be quite enough. Things are made to last decades or centuries. Computers, whose cyclical obsoleteness and ubiquity is now ideologically central to capitalism, will be clunky non-portable affairs. Exchange is encouraged insofar as it brings durables to those who can be more creative tinkering with them than previous owners. Television is no longer watched in households. Cars, air travel, red meat, exotic fruits, psychoactive drugs and jewellery are luxuries everyone has access to on an occasional basis, through a system marked by fairness and generosity instead of competition and kinship. Contest and individual projects don’t disappear under Stoic collectivism, but merit and talent have a universalising not individualising impetus. One gains social recognition for his or her dedication to establishing humanity’s peculiar place in the cosmos, which can be done in countless ways.
5.6 Markets will continue existing as crucial places for the exchange of ideas and news as much as goods. The thorniest problem preventing generalised Stoicism and a communist mode of production is money. Money intrinsically creates a system of, and a desire for, quantification, accumulation and ego, even before capitalism. With banks abolished, money will be reduced to its most basic functions before being superseded by barter and gifts.
5.7 The benefits of geocommunism are so obvious that the few putting career before leisure and self before other, nostalgic for the old days of class and nation, are social misfits. Geocommunism requires no propaganda or censorship as such: its direct justification is the history of capital and war deranging the earth.
6 Eternal revolution
6.1 Many mistakes have been made in communist politics but it has far from exhausted possible ways of strategising struggle. Geocommunism gathers momentum by seeking the most universal – that is, planetarily imaginative – elements from past revolutionary sequences. The goal of radically redefining the relationship between government and people, country and city, intellectual and manual labour, work and pleasure, and man and woman in the late 1960s has to be back on the agenda. Radical movements and moments have to be analysed as unfinished potentials insofar as their global material context was not fully in view: anticolonial struggles over land from Mexico to India and Palestine; the French, Haitian, Russian, Spanish, Chinese and Cuban Revolutions, and recent leftward turns in Latin America; the Paris and Shanghai Communes; the popular overthrow of totalitarian communism and apartheid; anticapitalist movements first concentrated at Seattle; and, most importantly, the transnational efforts at revolution in 1848, 1968 and 2011.
These political subjectifications did not take into full account the imbrications of capital in the ecosystems which are to provide food, water, housing and energy for the masses of humanity. This omission has been pointed out in ecosocialism and third world and indigenous activism, but geocommunism, qua communism, goes further, and calls for the institution of new modes of production globally, not the restitution of local lifeworlds or the rights of Mother Earth (the Cochabamba Protocol). Capitalism feeds off deep animal desires and fossilised solar energy hence is absolutely not ‘at war with nature’. Even if Kantian radical evil means no perfect planetary justice is achievable, the psychotic destructiveness of capital can be stamped out.
6.2 Against a current dominance in the revolutionary left of anarchism and direct democracy, Lenin’s prescription of a group of professional revolutionaries taking leadership in reorganising society still holds true. However, Lenin’s scientism made him blind to the fact that the economic and bureaucratic structures communism inherits from capitalism themselves tend towards exploitation and environmental degradation. The aim is not only take-over of power but the dismantling of the industrial and military complex. Hence geocommunist revolution is at once political, economic and cultural. Revolution becomes a way of life yet prevents itself from tipping over into chaos. The ever-growing successes of the new communist modes of production, of peace-keeping and of disaster relief, not ideology per se, are what will convince the masses of the revolution’s justice and feasibility. Science will aid the war over information unlike it did for Lenin, as it is already telling the world the objective reasons why geocommunism is necessary. If bourgeois media attempt to discredit us, we point at climate scenarios.
6.3 The temporality of revolution is well known: it is one of urgency about the problems at hand; patience in mobilisation; retroactive constitution of sudden breakthroughs (the revolutionary sequences as such) which are remembered and repeated without nostalgia; anticipation of defeat with a realist not theological hope in salvation; eternity of the principles of justice, trust and equality. There is a geocommunist use of utopianism, especially in planning, but science and informed public debate always take priority. The spatiality of revolution is more daunting to fathom. How can communism ever be victorious over the immense thickness of global capitalism, especially now that the consensus is that communism is dead and buried? What is certain is that capital is too good at ignoring or reabsorbing local creativities like Occupy for believing experimentation without some kind of charismatic centralisation can change the overall system.
The Anthropocene calls for a Geocommunist International consisting of national and city chapters whose autonomy is initially strictly limited by the simplicity and pragmatism of the objectives. Revolution unfolds as a densifying network of sites connected not merely through a clear internationalist perspective but the concomitant scientific investigation of how the geographies of governance and production are to be transformed. Exactly how and where capitalist governments can be first successfully disassembled – that is, instigating further successes without provoking more militarised anticommunism – can be ascertained only once the Geocommunist International has commenced its war of position. It has to be a spectre haunting much of the earth before it can become of flesh and blood.
6.4 The models of self-constitutive, non-spontaneous, permanent revolution in Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky and Mao have to be reimagined in light of far-reaching financialisation and the demands the earth puts on what is possible in the very long term. These models remain voluntarist to the extent that the objectives of revolution are defined politically, in terms of the usurpation of particular institutional regimes of labour and distribution that inherit the anthropo- and Eurocentric growth imperative. Geocommunist revolution imagines itself from the start at the scale of the planet. It attempts to think production on geological timescales (hydrocarbons, water and nitrogen cycles, polar methane, gene mutation, uranium, ozone, plastics). Its political strategies are immediately economic, deriving from science and from ordinary people’s resilience a continuously reformulated programme to adapt production to changing biophysical conditions. The revolution is therefore not just permanent, but eternal, as these conditions will always change and already bear the mark of human stupidity.
6.5 Collectively monitored and centralised institutions will be necessary for deindustrialisation, science and education, resource management and eventually demonetarisation. Gradually the state intervenes only when and where there is crisis. Gradually ownership becomes irrelevant. As the earth enters an era without environmental injustice, anthropogenic climate change and cascading extinction, the state withers away. It is impossible to foresee the form of the federations of cities under global geocommunism – in particular, how knowledge, decision-making and production will interlock – but we know a state based on repression and war is doomed.
6.6 Communism is the end of class, race and nation as we have known them. There will be no more North and South, no more resource wars or militarised borders, no more growth, backwardness, underdevelopment, not even a steady-state economy. It is the biosphere itself which demands an economic system actively blocking the emergence of disparities and segregations. Though there will be a massive meltdown of global processes, first and foremost in finance, the geocommunist mode of production is much more than simply slowing-down, downscaling and localising, because resource disparities can in the medium-term only be dealt with using the speeds and know-how of global networks. Geocommunism aims at sustainability, but by working through a chaotic biospheric undergrowth which itself undermines all forms of sustainability. What is sustained is no longer trade and profit but the movement beyond the Anthropocene towards justice, the elimination of racist vulnerabilities, the shedding of absurdity.
6.7 ‘Take care that in my enthusiasm I don’t deceive both myself and you, and that I don’t go off like a bee leaving my sting behind’ (Phaedo 91c).
Send suggestions and criticisms to Arun Saldanha, .
Some essential books
Adorno & Horkheimer Dialectic of Enlightenment
Althusser For Marx
Badiou Saint Paul
Braudel Civilization and Capitalism
Comte General View of Positivism
Darwin Descent of Man
Deleuze & Guattari Thousand Plateaus
Erasmus Handbook for the Christian Soldier
Fanon Wretched of the Earth
Freud Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Hegel Philosophy of History
IPPC Assessment Reports
Kant Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone
Lenin State and Revolution
Luxemburg Reform or Revolution
Malthus Principle of Population
Marcus Aurelius Meditations
Mao Quotations
Marx Capital
Marx & Engels Communist Manifesto
Nietzsche Genealogy of Morals
Prigogine & Stengers Order out of Chaos
Rousseau Discourse on Inequality
Seneca On the Shortness of Life
Vernadsky Biosphere
Hello are using WordPress for your site platform? I’m new to the blog world but I’m trying to get started and create my own. Do you require any html coding knowledge to make your own blog? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
[…] to the discussions around vanguardism that emerged in response to Arun Saldanha’s “Some Principles of Geocommunism“, but also for Anthropocene politics more […]
[…] Saldanha, A. 2013. Some Principles of Geocommunism. Retrieved from: http://geocritique.org/arun-saldanha-some-principles-of-geocommunism/ […]
[…] Saldanha, A. (2013). Some Principles of Geocommunism. Retrieved from: http://geocritique.org/arun-saldanha-some-principles-of-geocommunism/ […]
[…] http://geocritique.org/arun-saldanha-some-principles-of-geocommunism/ […]
Arun! I’m so happy to read such your courageously provocative piece. You not only raise questions that are systematically suppressed in academic debates but also you make the bold move of proposing answers that fire up our utopian imaginations. To keep the conversation going, I’ll respond with a few provocative questions for you and others.
In the manifesto, you make a consistent distinction between “communism” and “anarchism.” What is your historical basis for making that distinction? From reading about the history of anti-capitalist movements, and from my own contemporary organizing experience, that sounds like a false dichotomy. In your response to Sophia below, you seem to admit this when you say, “Of course I’m caricaturing here, and I agree that the hangover of twentieth-century STATE COMMUNISM makes it difficult to conceive of how propaganda, science, education, and agitation have to interact to progressively convince cities and countries to chuck capitalist regimes… The debate between communism and anarchism is probably internal to revolutionary politics itself.” (emphasis added) In order to get away from relying on such a caricaturized, false dichotomy, I’d highly recommend looking into the history and present of the rich, diverse tendencies of the movements that have directly opposed state communism, particularly the movements of anarchist-communism, libertarian-communism, and autonomous Marxism. For examples of writings from contemporary and historical participants in these movements, see: http://libcom.org/ , http://www.midnightnotes.org/ , http://blackorchidcollective.wordpress.com/ , http://m1aa.org/ , http://recompositionblog.wordpress.com/, http://iww.org , among many others.
If you were to take a deeper examination at the role of such anarchist-communist actors in historical revolutionary movements, you would have to much more seriously problematize your view of two key modernist/colonialist institutions: the state and education. Along with the responses of many others here, I’m very concerned about your faith in a “geocommunist vanguard,” particularly because of this concepts seemingly uncritical acceptance of statist and educationalist principles. The latter principles, I think, serve as a thorough obstacle to seeing the already existing alternative forms autonomous organization and study that are being practiced in communities and movements around the world (e.g., as theorized by some anarcho-communists and autonomist marxists as study and self-governance in commons). Rather than setting up some new geocommunist vanguard (and positioning ourselves as part of it), why don’t we look for, affirm, and amplify the projects of the people who are already practicing forms of resistance and subversion of the complexly intertwined regimes of capitalism/state/coloniality/hetero-patriarchy/carbon economy, etc? The benefit of taking on an anarchist, anti-authoritarian, anti-state politics in combination with a communist politics adds, I think, the call to develop capacities for practicing a kind of “abolitionist calisthenics” against any fixed forms of hierarchy (e.g., of the state and education), and to embark on “search and destroy” missions for these in our own cities, neighborhoods, and workplaces.
Of course, this is not to advocate a kind of decentralized, localist, or individualist anarchism, but rather to advocate for joining and organizing with the international anarchist-communist groups that are doing this revolutionary work already. At the same time, I’m not saying that those groups should simply be joined uncritically. Rather, I think that those of us who have critical theories of the anthropocene, of colonialist/modernist dichotomies of nature-vs-society, and of naive humanism, can contribute a great deal to pushing those forms of organizing in more revolutionary directions in relation to climate change and other environmental political struggles.
I’d be interested to hear what you think of this response, and I’ll look forward to continuing the conversation!
Eli! Good to hear from you.
Thanks for raising the issue of vanguardism again… which makes you call for “anarchism-communism”. If that exists, it’s not something between anarchism and communism, but (I’m suggesting) signifies a kind of anarchism which wants to replace the capitalist state with some sort of return to a general commons. No communist would endorse the term. Communism is not just about promoting the commons let alone ‘community’ (a term ultimately belonging to conservativism, and used way too much by US anarchists, which I think is telling), locally or in some sector, but reorganizing society entirely, that is, getting rid of capitalism. Communism has been very critical of anarchism for not wanting to understand just how easily capital (with its police, intelligence, and entertainment forces) can accommodate a bit of anarchism, and in fact shares a penchant for outlaws, self-sufficiency, and a hatred of the state – it all turned out to be quintessentially American stuff. Since Marx and Engels communists have argued that anarchism in a confused way mostly unconsciously radicalizes some core ideas of bourgeois humanism, liberalism, and individualism.
These are very old debates, but I just need to shout out that the dichotomy of anarchism and communism is not false. The question of whether revolution should embrace a dictatorship of the proletariat – a phase wherein the majority of the people trust communist technocrats to dismantle the class structure – was central to the Leninist critique of ‘leftwing communism’. The dichotomy was again very real and tragically debilitating in the Spanish Revolution. Though it was also a question of Stalin playing a dirty game, there would have been so much more of a chance of keeping people power going if the anarchists wouldn’t have been so bloody intransigent about power. A revolution has to go on or it will be crushed! The world is bigger than Barcelona and Catalonia! Anarchism is constitutively naive, I can’t put it another way. Anarchism does not want to think about exactly how to go about strategically avoiding the backlash of capitalism which is far, far more than police repression.
With the petering out of the Occupy moment, I blame a lot of the woes of the radical left in the US on the dominance of anarchism. Imagine if there had been a stronger Marxist or even just social-democratic current. From what I can gather (I was in Europe at the time) there was such a fuss being made about any form of leadership that there was absolutely no chance in getting a broad base of progressive forces together in order to put some actual fucking pressure on Obama or Wall Street… Instead, nothing.
Of course Occupy was/is fabulous. I’m always telling my European friends just how vibrant and dedicated activism is in the US compared to (Northern) Europe. But one has to THINK now (hence READ – I could go on about the self-undermining anti-intellectualism of protest movements as well): how do we keep a revolution going? Which means convincing people who need convincing. When I hear about endless debates at some Occupy meetings about being absolutely inclusive, I’m pretty glad I wasn’t there. Revolution is more than the affect of exhilaration, it’s also constant planning and exercising a lot of patience, as well as having the courage to go along with what the leadership (elected, of course) decides. Why is there such a knee-jerk reaction against having a centralized system of decision-making? There has to be trust in a division of labor, not fruitless whining about the evils of hierarchy. You trust a mechanic with your car, why don’t you trust the most experienced people with revolution.
To see how logically absurd anarchism is – it has no clear sense of what it’s fighting against and for – it behooves to understand how neoliberalism and libertarianism sometimes get into its proximity – all against the state right? And how someone gets to writing something like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki_The_Right_To_Be_Greedy:_Theses_On_The_Practical_Necessity_Of_Demanding_Everything
Anyway none of this tirade of mine is new – see http://www.marxists.org/subject/anarchism/
This afternoon I picked up a collection Marxism and Anarchism from a Minneapolis publisher Well Red, with a selection of foundational statements.
A very good theoretical overview is given by Plekhanov (basically the guy who brought Marxism into Russia):
http://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1895/anarch/index.htm
So when I said the tension between anarchism and communism is probably intrinsic to radical politics, I meant that under capitalism there will always be people who think it’s power that need to be fought – instead of the mode of production and its liberal ideological machinery. But anarchism isn’t something to be lamented and ridiculed (just a bunch of immature dupes to individualist ideology wasting all their zealous energy) but engaged with, in order to avoid theStalinist perversion which anarchists are rightfully afraid of, i.e. bring Leninism through a different trajectory.
Thanks, Arun, for your generous reply! I appreciate your engaging with me on the anarchism vs. communism issue. In response to your questioning whether “anarchism-communism,” exists, I must emphatically reply that it does exist! For a start at learning about some of the many historical influences and examples of it, see the wiki page here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_communism
For some contemporary examples of organizations that embody anarcho-communist principles (which are combined in various, conflicting or complementary ways with forms of autonomist marxism, anarchist-syndicalism, and other forms of ultra-left communism), check out some of the links that I gave in my previous reply. Rather than relying on Marxist authors (such as on marxist.org) for your views on anarchism, I’d recommend checking out sources that don’t have a long-standing historical bias against anarchism and that don’t tend to give ‘strawman argument’ versions of it.
I’m not only defending anarcho-communisms and autonomist marxisms here because I think they are political-theoretically superior to statist communisms, but rather, also, based on my experiences of organizing with various groups, I’ve found them to be far more effective at achieving their revolutionary goals in organizing practice. For example, in the Twin Cities, the best organizing I’ve seen has been with the Industrial Workers of the World (a revolutionary union whose members are heavily influenced by anarchist-communist/syndicalist and autonomist marxist theories). This is not to say that they don’t have flaws that lead them to fail in many ways. But, by contrast, I think that their organizing has been way more effective at building a revolutionary culture and movement than has that of some groups in the Twin Cities who organize with various state communist (Marxist-Leninst, Trotskyist, and Maoist) approaches. If you’d like to hear more about this, I could give you many examples…
Thanks again, Arun, for allowing us to host your piece,
which as anticipated has provoked a rich and fascinating discussion. I think
that this piece is exciting because, in addition to responding to the
persistent possibilities of communism, it imagines what might be done in the
Anthropocene. It strives to think a future that is inhabited in quite different
ways than the present, even if at some points this imagined future reaches to
perhaps less desirable extremes.
I want to apologize for joining the conversation somewhat
late; though I got lucky because many others have brought up similar questions
and concerns to those I had when reading (and re-reading) this piece, and have
articulated them far better than I could have. In particular, I share concerns with
many others over the piece’s apparent vanguardism and the dangers of a
political project with foundations in notions of natural limits.
I have two
additional points I’d like to raise, and I’m very interested to read your
response.
The first touches on issues some others have raised, but I’d
like to state it very simply here: How would geocommunism hope to avoid the
problems, especially the violences, inherent in all other universal political
programs (or theories)? I’m not sure I need to elaborate much here.
My second point is somewhat less direct, and I hope you will
indulge what at first (and admittedly perhaps at last too) will probably seem
like a tangent. But it might be another angle on the (potential) problem of
vanguardism, and it might also lead to another way of thinking about the
problem and potential of desire.
With your piece on my mind, I recently re-encountered the
Arundhati Roy quote, “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On
a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” I realize that at first glance this seems
to have little to do with Geocommunism. But as I considered it, I began to
think that this very fact points to something that left me a bit unsettled with
regard to Geocommunism.
What is it that is so alluring about Roy’s quote (even if it
is a bit cheesy)? Roy invokes the intimate and perhaps near-universal
experience of sensing the breath of a loved one, and it is there that she finds
it possible to divine another, better world, one that is both in the future and
already here. Sensing another person
breathe is perhaps a different form of ‘minimal humanism’; at once mundane and
lively, it is an example of what feminist geographers such as Geraldine Pratt,
Melissa Wright, Jennifer Hyndman, and Alison Mountz have called “the global
intimate,” shared embodied experiences capable of connecting people at the same time that they highlight vast differences. Revolutions, I’ll admit, are not
likely to be quiet. But I can’t help but wonder if revolutionary desire can’t
be in part be fomented through these experiences, in these moments, and if it
doesn’t, in the end, have to answer to their power.
I understand that Geocommunism starts from the premise of
the already-existing natural world that characterizes the Anthropocene. But is
there any way that Geocommunism resonates with or finds conditions of
possibility in embodied, everyday experiences that already exist?
Thanks Jessi for some more questions!
Very briefly about your first question: this question is very particular to our present. If you asked left intellectuals (especially in the South) between the 1950s and early 1980s how they think they’ll avoid instigating violence through their self-professed universal political project, and they’d have branded you a rightwing relativist. Of course, critiques of Eurocentrism and colonialism and patriarchy already existed, but these don’t completely debunk universalism! You seem to imply that universalism – the belief that humans share some basic emotions and requirements and that emancipation is not just for the privileged – is itself totalitarian, which is I think a very unfortunate effect of postmodernist attacks on the Enlightenment -which I used to be privy to as well.
Any universalism (Socrates as citizen not of Athens but the world, Buddhist, Christian, humanist, Enlightenment, science) is explicitly CONCEIVED as an attack on racism and provincialism, i.e. it’s about overcoming identity, borders, and wars. The UN is the most obvious, and simplistic, instantiation of the idea of universality. Of course the poststructuralist/pomo critiques of universalism remain necessary, showing as they do that universalism can hide particularisms on a deeper level, but this in itself doesn’t make universalization irrelevant! On the contrary. Following many on the left (Badiou, Laclau, Zizek, but see also Iragaray, or Fanon) – universality is something to be invented, it’s not given like some instinct – and it’s at odds with the status quo – capitalism is also universalizing, but only by unleashing violence unevenly on populations.
I’ve written about these things (the tension of feminism and universalism) in my recent Angelaki article.
Thanks for the Arundhati Roy quote. The questions I would ask her: how to get more people to hear the new world breathing? How does that breath make me, and crucially, many many others, breathe differently? How to fight the powers that want to cut off the oxygen off this new movement? In Roy’s quote (and this has to do with its cheesiness, though I’m not against cheese at all), there’s nothing that allows for politics as such – making changes collectively – there’s only the fact she feels a new world is possible, important though that feeling is. The seeds for a geocommunist society already exist, they have to, but my impatience is (as you know by now!) with the overemphasis in today’s theory on this waiting for when the “already-existing”, breathing, comforting, abundant Mother Earth is going to deliver us from evil. She won’t do it! We have to ourselves.
Arun,
Thank you for such a rich document and for putting it up on Geocritique for all to view. Over the past few weeks, I’ve returned to thinking on your Principles a number of times. I find the essay challenging. Not because it is a difficult read—on the contrary, it’s refreshingly clear—but because it calls on us to confront thorny problems often elided or taken for granted in environmentalist circles and by environmentally-minded academic radicals. Reading over Sophia’s comments, I was struck by her sentiment that we need to centralize the disparity between “what we believe is really true from what we want to be true”. I feel like the Geocommunist Principles encourage those of us interested in imagining & building futures after capitalism to begin that process. Accordingly, I think the document is an important start to a conversation I hope will be ongoing. Below are three elements of the essay that were sticking points for me. ***Just as I’m posting I see that Sara and I are similarly stuck on the issues of resource limits. She fleshes out the critique with great eloquence and detail, but at risk of redundancy, I’ve nevertheless posted my original comments with some small amendments throughout.***
First, I was surprised by the first of your four facts that “resources are per definition finite.” This fact serves as the basis of environmental activism, but as far as I’m concerned is a particularly dangerous ground for any philosophy or politics. Yes, of course, the earth and its resources are not infinite; their finitude—and ours—is a fact. And, of course, whatever eco-social future we bring into being will confront limits by choice or otherwise. That we confront limits daily is similarly a fact. So too is that they are an intimate part of capitalist production (Harvey’s arguments that capitalism requires limits if only to overcome them by moving them around in space and time come to mind). More importantly, though, resource finitude is also wielded as one of the most effective cudgels of neoliberal and now austerity capitalism. In what is in fact a time of relative abundance, states and populations are constantly told that there is only so much to go around and disciplined accordingly. It seems to me that limited resources have long served strategies of social control, ultimately perpetuating rather than challenging racist biopolitical realities (and I think one might make the argument that they have done so even before the advent of the Anthropocene or capitalism).
Practically, this question of limited resources is particularly thorny. You seem to suggest that some kind of scientific investigation of resource quantities will help to enable us to distribute and ration them equitably. But resource limits are not absolute (as Sara details). This does not mean that resource finitude does not exist. Rather, is makes us aware that we cannot rely on the biosphere/geosphere to tell us where the boundaries of finitude lie. Someone therefore must decide on what resources are to be delimited and what those limits are. Who will do this? And how will consensus on those limits be achieved? You seem to suggest collaboration between the geocommunist vanguard and geocommunist scientists, but I think Sophia’s concerns over geo-/eco-fascism and Sara’s over Malthusian eugenics re particularly valid here.
In addition to Sara’s suggestion that a geocommunist scientific practice take up systems theory rather than some version of neo-Malthusianism, I wonder if a better strategy for forging an anti-fascist geocommunism may be to amplify what you have written about psychoanalysis, particularly in relation to commodity fetishism, subjectification, and desiring production. It seems to me that rather than absolute limits, we should be talking about how the profit imperative both produces excesses and also manufactures a tension between desire and lack. It is no mistake that as we cultivate an appetite for computers, smart phones, and tablets, we are simultaneously told the resources for social services, economic and social security during young and old-age, etc. are too scarce: both keep us working in a time of relative abundance. Therefore (and as Cesare Casarino has argued), the most important site of class struggle may well be the body as a site of desire, where decoupling pleasure from consumerism could generate new social relations. Might we imagine a geo-communism less about perpetuating austerity measures and more about re-aligning desiring-production with principles of justice, “the elimination of racist vulnerabilities” and eco-social fulfillment/stability? As Sara also suggests, this may take as its starting point abundance and wealth in social relations rather than scarcity.
Second, I like your discussion of science and the need for a return to scientificity after critiques of positivism and naïve realism. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I think clarifying the relationship between contemporary scientific practices/beliefs and alternative systems of knowledge/value is a necessary process tied to any post-capitalist future. It is also an incredibly difficult one. But I am skeptical that “making justice and critical thinking” part of science is enough. Hierarchies in knowledge production must also be dismantled. I think we need to really begin to explore what kinds of organizational principles or institutions might engender radical transformations in how knowledge is made and circulated (particularly at the current conjuncture, when any form of education seems under attack). Looking more deeply at historic and non-Western examples of knowledge production—along with, as you write, non-modern cosmologies—might be particularly useful in reimagining what new forms of ‘scientificity’ might be forged.
I similarly appreciate the arguments for a “non-anthropocentric” “minimal humanism,” although I’m not sure of the conceptual clarity of this idea. Nevertheless, I agree with many of your claims about humanism’s values as well as the danger of nihilistic fantasies. I also agree that “the conviction humans are worth their salvation” ought to be retained. And while I agree with Neel here that historical events take place through assemblages rather than simply according to some ‘will of the people,’ this doesn’t necessarily mean that nonhuman life itself is politically engaged. For that reason alone, I think we want to think carefully on what a non-anthropocentric (or less-anthropocentric) politics might look like or whether some measure of anthropocentrism needs to be maintained for politics to take place at all. This is the bread and butter of the literature on New Materialisms, but I still think much more work needs to be done (elsewhere, but also here) to reconsider the relationships between matter, human-nonhuman relations, and political thought. In light of the other Principles, I can image how reconfiguring ‘science’/knowledge production could help create alternative political arrangements by distributing power and knowledge more equitably across a (more-than-human) social milieu. Certainly, the writing of Latour and others would support this and it seems like a good place to start.
All that said, your advance of the geocommunist vanguard as the directors of our eco-social future seems to be at odds with the call for minimal humanism. Vanguardism has historically relied heavily on an unquestioned political anthropocentrism and I’d be very interested to hear what how you are envisioning the non-anthropocentric, Stoic geocommunist version.
I look forward to reading your thoughts, Arun.
Elizabeth
Thanks to Elizabeth for yet more thought provocation!
Resource scarcity might be one of the key sites emerging for theoretical disagreements in critical geography, it seems. Very good. Now, what is a resource? Something used in economic production located, found, extracted only at some points or arteries of the earth’s mantle and biosphere. It is refined, transported, and used also under extremely particular geographical, economic, and cultural conditions. So saying a resource is ‘per definition’ limited or finite simply means that (as you and Sara yourselves say) it’s some groups of people who are capable of starting and stopping its flow, as well as (as I argue we should agree with the more environmental-determinists) that reservoirs of many resources are indeed running out, becoming polluted, and increasingly militarized. You don’t need to turn to thermodynamics to remember the opposite of my statement is nonsensical: even nuclear, sun, waste, and wind power are not technically infinite because of various geographical, technological and political restrictions on their adoption.
Putting finitude right at the centre of debate is rhetorically crucial even if (or maybe precisely thanks to the fact that) for a few seconds it sounds like I’m a rightwinger or alarmist. Neoliberal discourse can be demolished by pointing out its so-called austerity is a hideous scam – true austerity would not target the poor but the rich, not overpopulation but overconsumption, not the state but finance. You can tell from the tone of this manifesto that I’m not really against austerity as such – as a philosophical concept – but capitalism is essentially incapable of it, despite Weber’s effort at covering up this fact. So I completely agree there’s an obscene level of material abundance in the world that could be shared equitably. For that, however, we need to insist that it’s the amazing selfishness of those at the top who first need to listen to the stories of scarcity, which would then lead to dismantling a system which produces superabundance for the few while necessarily depriving the majority.
As for who will decide on how resources are allocated under communism, yes, that’s the central political-economic problem, understanding that twentieth-century centralist and industrialist communisms could not do this in a sustainable and equitable way. I don’t believe scientific and political vanguardism (some kind of reinvention of Marxism-Leninism) necessarily leads to authoritarian or fascist regimes, precisely because in remaining dedicated to emancipation under the auspices of popular legitimacy, both have to eschew the ossification of decision-making in order to proceed. It’s not a consensus that communism will be after but constant redefining of what is fair and practical. You’re entirely right there are no absolute benchmarks for ‘how much’ each individual or city or house should receive, but as you have guessed, I think one has to start the difficult conversation of rationing (rationing the rich first, needless to say) as a medium-term economic strategy. Only a naively localist anarchist or libertarian framework can be against rationing the rich – let’s build our own little utopia and let the global jet set continue consuming their yachts and diamonds and rhino hunting??
In a word, if we start with valorizing abundance, we run the risk of secretly coveting those yachts and diamond and rhino hunting. Here psychoanalysis could come into the picture: a relentless critique of consumer desire includes unmasking the fantasy driving anarchist and utopian-socialist imaginations of some sort of undefined and undefinable luxuriousness remaining possible in the ‘community’ of allegedly like-minded creative folks in the forest or squatter warehouse. Against this all too strong tendency in radical circles of the US and EU at the moment, I want to say (and I follow Marx here) don’t believe desire or the body or communitas can save us! Not only have these notions been entirely and subtly hijacked by capitalism, it is a fundamental hypocrisy of capitalism that all humans can live middle-class lives if they only try. This (the unavoidability of scarcity) is what science tells us, and quite paradoxically so as it’s mostly a servant of capital and the state, as you say. So let’s drive a wedge between capital and science to fully drive this paradox towards a different system altogether. Don’t let a few years of ‘austerity measures’ fool you – capital and religion create ideologies of abundance within reach and hence keep the masses docile. As I’ve said before, Malthus has a weirdly anticapitalist, pre-modern message, which now has to be pulled out with great urgency.
But Stoicism is needed to remain in charge of, not bogged by, the destiny of scarcity! Happy abstinence,
Arun
Dear Arun,
Thanks so much for contributing this provocative piece, and taking up all of these
crucial questions. There are many things I find compelling about this vision,
but one central premise that troubles me that I think merits questioning:
namely, the first proposition, that “resources are per definition finite.”
This proposition encapsulates, I think, a tension that for me runs through the whole piece between a Deleuzian ontology (2.5) and a concept of natural limits – or, as you describe, the effort to repoliticize Malthus “in the opposite direction”
(1.3). The motivating urgency to which the piece is responding – resource
scarcity and ecological limits – seems in fact to rely on a very different
conception of nature than the one Deleuze and Guattari offer; it seems to rely
on a dualism in which, even as human social and biospheric systems are seen as
interconnected, humans are primarily a source of disturbance to ecosystems (and
capitalism is only the latest instance of this negative impact, accelerating
and intensifying it: “Humans have always had drastic effects on ecosystems,
even as hunter-gatherers, but agriculture then industrialisation were the key
thresholds increasing the species’ footprint” [1.2]). Despite the critique of
Nature in this piece, a dualism is reinscribed in the concept of immutable and
universal scarcity.
It is not that I would contest the accuracy of the statement that, for example,
biospheric life as we know it depends on “keeping minerals and fossil fuels in
the ground” (1.3). But to equate the scarcity of fossil fuels with a
fundamental scarcity of resources in general seems to me to pose some problems. If you can forgive what seems like a digression, I want to highlight some of the commonalities between this piece and an earlier generation of thinkers on natural limits in the 1970s in order to try and articulate what I find
troubling about this perspective. I think recalling the ubiquity of these
earlier concepts of absolute limits is important for interrogating their utility
for a revolutionary politics now.
The perspective on resources in this piece is strikingly close to that offered by both ecological economists like Herman Daly, Kenneth Boulding, and Nicolaus
Georgescu-Roegen (not to mention neo-Malthusians like Paul Ehrlich) as well as
eco-Marxists. Based in a particular interpretation of the second law of
thermodynamics (that entropy in a closed system never decreases), ecological
economists responded to the growing awareness of ecological crisis and energy
scarcity in the 1960s and 70s with a strict formula for degrowth and
equilibrium of population and resource extraction, described in their notion of
the “steady-state economy”. The limits to resource use and carrying capacity,
they argued, would be reached inevitably, given the ultimate scarcity of
resources (not just fossil fuels, but “low-entropy matter-energy” in the
universe); the question was only whether the “steady-state economy” would be
the result of rational planning or the outcome of a catastrophic encounter with
natural limits. Their vision was given scientific weight with the publication
of the Club of Rome’s famous Limits to Growth report in 1972, which
built the Malthusian assumptions of the ecological economists into an
experimental computer model of the entire world system, concluding that the
limits to growth would be reached in approximately 100 years. In this light,
they advocated a post-industrial economy based on maximizing intangible
“services” with minimum material throughputs.
These same assumptions were taken up by many eco-Marxists, who accepted the basic ecological propositions of ecological economics but traced the origins of ecological crisis to the mismatch between the expansionary tendency of capital and the material finitude of the planet. They developed a very similar critique of
Marxism to that named in this piece, namely that Marx inherited an anthropocentric vision of nature and didn’t adequately account for the scarcity
of material resources. They made the ecological economists’ vision of
nature-as-limit and the threat of ecological catastrophe into an argument for
an anticapitalist politics.
These thinkers’ founding assumptions and the political conclusions they drew from it were in many ways consistent with those laid out here. In fact, despite the
statement that “There will be no more North and South, no more resource wars or
militarised borders, no more growth, backwardness, underdevelopment, not even a steady-state economy” (6.6), the vision laid out here could be read as a communist version of the steady-state economy, a centrally-planned and controlled society based on the regulation of levels of resource consumption and the idea that “Abundance will be spiritual not material, of culture and pleasure not of goods” (1.3). While the “third way” politics of the ecological economists lacked any robust critique of political economy or concept of a revolutionary project, as is laid out here, it shared with this piece a vision of material nature as scarcity. I
think that, contrary to the critique of Marxist thinking in this piece, the
notion of material natures as limits to capital has become pervasive, and has
in many ways constrained Marxian critiques of mainstream environmentalism. It
seems to me that any effort to take the earth seriously as an object of
politics has to account for its creativity and dynamism, its abundance and
excess, which may manifest in politically desirable or undesirable ways – as a
proliferation of life, or an excess of hydrofluorocarbons in the atmosphere. The
static notion of nature as absolute limit seems to me incompatible with this
perspective.
As a response to this notion of absolute limits, it first seems worth drawing
attention to the work of resource geographers to demonstrate that “resources”
are always the result of particular historical and technological arrangements
of social and biophysical processes – “resources” as an abstract or general
category is meaningless. Second, a whole tradition of Marxian responses to
neo-Malthusians have demonstrated that we are in many ways living in an era of
abundance, in which scarcity for some must be continually produced in order to
maintain class power. The focus on equity in distribution, rather than quantity
of production, which this piece of course shares, is I think not in fact
compatible with a Malthusian perspective (the whole idea of the ‘demographic
transition’ itself is a counter to Malthusian ‘natural’ laws [1.3]).
Third, the whole notion of absolute limits in the work of ecological economists came under scrutiny with a new era of systems thinking (a prime example is C.S. Holling’s work on resilience), which envisioned social and ecological systems in a
co-evolutionary relationship of mutual transformation. While this didn’t reject
the notion of limits altogether, it replaced the notion of absolute limits with
what we might call relative limits. Because the possibilities for both social and biophysical innovation are inherently unknowable, and because ‘limits’ are always relative to a given concatenation of systems in a process of mutual transformation, identifying a precise number or ‘carrying capacity’ for planetary life would be meaningless. What appears as waste to a given system could just as easily constitute a resource for another system. This later generation of systems thinking is hugely influential in mainstream (capitalist) thinking on climate change adaptation – exemplified in the proliferation of literature on the possibilities for
social-ecological “transformation,” which aims to identify how an entirely new
system for social-ecological production can emerge from the destruction of an
outmoded, maladaptive system. This literature lacks political imagination or
any kind of critique of political economy, but nonetheless asks the question of
how, given the complex interconnectivity of social, cultural, ecological, and
biophysical systems at all scales, local-level change can reverberate across scales and precipitate large-scale transformation. It also asks how emergent (social or ecological) crises can be exploited as opportunities for change. The fact
that these possibilities are even being asked, and that serious scientific work
is going into answering them, to me suggests some tools to be appropriated by a
revolutionary project that would seek to establish new relations among
experimental scientific and political practice. These research agendas,
appropriated by a revolutionary project, could form the basis for a “scientific
investigation of how the geographies of governance and production are to be
transformed” by locating vulnerabilities in the system that could be
strategically exploited (6.3). If an alliance between scientific and
revolutionary practice is part of a geocommunistic project, it may be both
necessary and productive to address the ways that systems theory (identified
here as an important tool for geocommunism to “embrace” (2.4)) is thinking very
differently about limits than the neo-Malthusian propositions of an earlier
generation.
From this perspective, we could just as easily frame a geocommunist project as an attempt to transform the social resource base into one that sustains the kind
of abundance that geocommunism proposes, rather than relying on resource
scarcity as the main motivation for political action. Reframing the notion of
limits from absolute to relative is important, it seems to me, because it
enables us to envision a noncapitalist future as more than simply the
impoverishment of the current system, the abrupt imposition of a reality of
austerity in place of the false abundance of capitalism. Based on a conception
of absolute limits, communism becomes (here very explicitly) not a realization
of abundance, but a system for managing scarcity – a kind of leftist austerity
for which it seems ‘there is no alternative’: “The Anthropocene will never be
blessed with abundance for all, as both orthodox communists and green-liberal
economists hope. Peak oil and the finitude of rare earths are only the most
obvious indications that scarcity is the future’s objective imperative” (1.3).
It becomes a capitulation to the laws of Nature rather than a progressive
project. (“It is the biosphere itself which demands an economic system actively
blocking the emergence of disparities by dynamically grounding production in
what is ecologically possible” [5.6]). Aside from the fact that notions of
‘peak oil’ are by no means uncontested (as the ongoing boom in North Dakota,
where kerogen-impregnated rock has now become ‘oil’, attests), I’m unconvinced
that the discourse of resource scarcity can succeed in catalyzing a green
anticapitalism now when it failed to do so in the 1970s.
Imagining geocommunism in terms of (a different kind of) abundance rather than scarcity seems necessary in order to cultivate any kind of revolutionary desire for another world. While this comes in towards the end of the piece, it does not provide the primary motivation, and is augmented by strong doses of austerity
prescribed by global technocrats. If there is to be any motivating force for a
geocommunist project, the cultivation of desire is crucial, as opposed to finding
that motivating force in the fear of a catastrophic encounter with resource
scarcity. The scarcity of fossil fuels (in combination with the excessive
abundance of CO2) is certainly one of the central constraints that could
motivate an anticapitalist politics, and could motivate the production of a
desire for a different future; but it could just as easily motivate a regressive, reactionary politics, whether it be a eugenicist Malthusianism (I’m
still not convinced that there could be any other kind) or a counterrevolutionary
green capitalism (which has so far been more effective at producing this desire
than just about anything on the left). Again, this isn’t a matter of denying particular scarcities, but of recognizing these as relative to a given mode of production and transformable, rather than posing general scarcity as a characteristic of material natures as such that demands a particular social organization.
The notion of absolute limits contributes to other tensions in the piece, I think, in
particular the relation between politics and science. I absolutely agree that “There
is an appetite for revolution and experiment” (intro), but the formula for an
enforced global equality demanded by scarcity seems to preclude the possibility
of any real collective experimentation. We have instead a “global interest”
that is to be identified and communicated to the people by scientists and
carried out by the geocommunist vanguard (2.3). Science appears monolithic,
bearing a single message that can be translated to the people who will come to
understand where their interest really lies. With a notion of relative limits,
in contrast, the political and organizational project would have to begin by
(democratically) identifying the very ‘limits’ with which we are concerned, or
which would cause undesirable consequences – e.g., biodiversity loss, ocean
acidification, CO2 ppm, etc. – and weighing appropriate responses to them,
rather than positing these in advance.
The fact that the starting point here is resource scarcity rather than the
cultivation of a revolutionary desire makes the vanguardism of the project somewhat troubling. I think there’s an interesting conversation to be had about the role of the vanguard, and I’m not trying to use that as a derogatory term or reject it out of hand. But I do think that more attention to the conditions of
possibility for a geocommunist politics – socially and culturally as well as
ecologically – is necessary; it seems important to identify some concrete lines
of flight. I will admit that, based on history, I don’t share the faith that “the
state will wither away” (5.5). Further, the possibility for the global state
that would be required to enforce this isn’t visible to me – as seems to be
admitted up front in the statement that “Unlike in 1848 or 1917 there is no
spectre of communism haunting any country. No concrete strategies to take over
power can be formulated” (intro). If there are no apparent conditions that
could give rise to the global state necessary to enforce the geocommunist
program (whether or not such a state would be desirable), how are we to get
there?
Again, I want to say thanks for this really insightful (and fun to read) provocation. Looking forward to your thoughts,
Sara
Sara, thank you thank you for what’s a detailed critical essay in its own right about the problem of abundance. Allow me to be short. You understand my position well. The rhetorical ploy I’m heading towards is that of a Trojan guerrilla horse inside the camp of respectable Malthusianism: you say there’s scarcity? Then why are resources not shared, assembled, and extracted more rationally? Do you want us to start shooting and eating each other? There’s a certain knee-jerk anti-Malthusianism amongst the left that forgets that going along a bit with Malthus’s pessimism only demonstrates the contradictions of capitalist ideologies.
Insisting that abundance is possible for all, that all talk of physical finitude is ideological or debilitating, that limits are not only relative to social formations and modes of productions (I agree with you entirely here) but the wrong starting point of critique, all of this risks utopian socialism, anarchism, some strands of Bataillian poststructuralism (forgetting that excess is always a violence), and it has to be said, strands of New Agey visions of eco-futures. As you note Deleuze is not a philosopher readily associated with scarcity. Deleuze’s world is one of unreason, unhinging, heterogeneity. But does that make of Deleuze – think especially of Coldness and Cruelty, Logic of Sense, Logic of Sensation, The Fold, Immanence – a thinker of excess, plenitude, overflowing muchness? Increasingly, Deleuze scholars are presenting a more serious, cautious, and Stoic Deleuze. What if the insistence on abundance is capitalism’s ideological trick, and Malthus was essentially a Christian-conservative anticapitalist?
The question of desire is crucial – who will want to jump on the geocommunist bandwagon if it’s all about austerity and being cautious and other miserable topics? Here I still need to derive more of a concept of non-masochistic pleasure following from living the plain life with diverse others in urban contexts. As Sophia says, working half-time is definitely going to lift spirits. To put it most simply, I’m targeting the dominant sort-of-Spinozist joyful OWS predominance within the radical left, trying to expose its docility towards liberal-capitalist optimism and individualism. If the future looks bleak it doesn’t mean we cannot invent new ways of being happy with what there is. I’m making quite a self-conscious return to deontological and monastic examples here.
Now, you’re right to note a lot of my observations and even recommendations hark back to ecosocialism and the Club of Rome before that, both of which have hardly managed to slow down capital’s socio-ecological destructiveness. It’s again a question of whether to take advantage of existing propensities in one’s enemy’s discourse, or identify oneself entirely negatively against it. I have no problem admitting the scarcity debate of the 1970s was seminal. It’s a pity it wasn’t Marxists raising these issues. I think communists have to seduce environmentally minded liberals and conservatives further left: bad, isn’t it, that growth imperative? So what keeps us from getting rid of it? And it’s precisely here that geocommunism could offer some sturdy points of reference for calling out the hypocrisy or lameness of previous critiques of growth.
Thanks for starting this discussion, Arun, and thanks to the other commenters. “Some Principles of Geocommunism” doesn’t just confront important questions, it tackles tough ones as well. We want to formulate a viable and realistic path toward the future, and that means questioning whether today’s currents of green capitalism and policy change are really the best way to direct our energy. Here are some of my thoughts upon reading “Geocommunism.”
2.1 – You turn to a new Malthusian argument, but the very foundation of this argument—that of overpopulation—needs to be questioned. Population numbers are not really the issue. The issue is how we conduct ourselves. Or perhaps, more specifically, capitalism + a small population may carry on, while capitalism + a large population puts pressure on the planet ecologically (and perhaps on our impersonal, individuated social system, as well). But communism + a large population may very well function without a problem.
2.3 – As you know, we must rethink the definition of science if we are to universalize it. And I see that as a big “if.” It doesn’t take science to come to the same conclusions as you do about the anthropocene and its discontents. I also wonder if the very definition of science doesn’t require a dogmatic belief in its own objectivism. I do buy that science is qualitatively different from religion, but if it is going to become universal, it has to be wholly compatible with religion, because religions aren’t going to disappear, and they’re not going to be able to simply throw out concepts like divine intervention while retaining other intellectual and mystical philosophies. Geocommunism seems to be “communism by scientists,” scientists who are not content to take a back seat during an endgame. But even the category “radical scientists” cannot contain homogenous beliefs. (I’m thinking of Neil Smith’s “Uneven Development” and (yes, problematic) ecofeminist stuff like Susan Griffin’s “Woman and Nature.”)
2.4 – It looks like geocommunism is trying to take an extremely realist account of the world so that we can better understand it and change it. But, do we want just any revolution, even one based on far-from-colorless-and-neutral concepts like survival of the fittest, even if these concepts are motivating? If we use these truths, aren’t they going to bite us back later? In the spirit that nothing is “meant to be,” why would we ever choose language and concepts that don’t fit our values?
2.5 – The idea of combining Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology with communism is lovely, though like Neel, I have anarchist leanings, and I am reluctant to label Deleuze and Guattari’s less savory tendencies anarchist. I’d like to think that anarchism implies certain standards. When the IDF applies Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas about decentering or about de- and re-territorialization for colonizing warfare, that is not anarchist—someone like Hakim Bey may bring in similar concepts for an entirely different project. This looms large for me since I intend to use rhizome / assemblage / material geography in my thesis, but I am having trouble pinpointing where it lands regarding Marxist analysis. Is there a connection between new materialism and historical materialism? Can deterritorializing be revolutionary, or just insurrectionary?
Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome seems to me a realistic ontology. It is liberating—but that’s just the problem, it’s liberal, not necessarily just. Yet, I am attached to my liberation, and believe that centralized organization is bound to disintegrate (at least into fascism). Perhaps I’m wrong? Perhaps we’d need to wander for 40 years after a revolution? It is tough to separate what we believe is really true from what we want to be true. Grappling with this disparity must become central in our analyses.
3.4 – We could all use an updated discussion on anarchism vs. communism. I have been reading insurrectionary anarchist work lately (“The Call” and “Between Predicates War” are both better than the more famous “Coming Insurrection”). They love to use the word communism. But they use it in quite a different way from geocommunism. Geocommunism includes a concerted effort toward change, with which I don’t disagree. The insurrectionists assume that lifestyle and instigated ruptures are the best form of resistance, as opposed to persuading people to take action through example via moralist-activist policy change (or regime change). In that, I agree with the insurrectionists—I simply don’t think the latter will work or last. A principle of persuasion can’t recruit the numbers or the quality of resistance that inter/personal strategies can.
An issue: You write, “Not greed, not mastery of nature or Cartesian dualism, but the inhuman self-augmenting force of capital is the cause of so-called ecocide.” But what is the cause of capitalism, and how will we get around it? We can focus on how capitalism is the main demon today, or at least the one that directly leads to ecological destruction, but we know that things weren’t exactly hunky dory before capitalism, either. It’s true that feudalism, say, wasn’t as environmentally destructive as capitalism is because feudalism didn’t have that encoded need for never-ending growth. But what about the problems raised by Cartesian dualism? I’m not arguing that we can erase dualism, even under a better social system. Rather, my concern is that whether it’s impending/current ecological disaster or glimpses of ecofascism that motivate us to finally change and confront this day of reckoning, we must also reckon for cruelty and oppression at the same time. Otherwise, geocommunism will risk at worst becoming geofascism, or at best losing a portion of the potential for justice we worked so hard to build.
Another issue is the problem of centralized communism. First of all, people are going to have trouble shedding their subjectivity. Second of all, even if we are able to do so, we’ll want to maintain some principles of autonomy, at least as small groups. Third of all, the greatest number of people in a group that can successfully know all the interrelationships between others in that group is 13. How can we maintain even a social, non-monastic concept of self in groups of one to ten million? (Further, why should we continue to believe that cities are encircled by real borders that protect nature rather than superficial borders that divide us socially from nature, but not economically?) It’s fair enough that you encourage Neel to come up with a better method, though—it’s hard to do. I would like to reread Laclau and Mouffe perhaps to think through the role that spatiality can have on forming a new society. Perhaps understanding geographic differences can help us deal with cultural and temporal differences.
3.5 – Regarding the adoration of literacy and bibliophilia: I love reading and books (and writing!) myself, but I can have great discussions with people who don’t read. Still others are quite literate, yet have detestable politics. In this age and place we do need books—Marxist reading groups, etc.—but I don’t think there is something essentially special about the written word. Oral intellectualism is just as valid, and will present new ways of thinking through problems. Doing away with indigenous ways of understanding is also a disturbing show of dominance on the part of scientists and the literate world. (I’m thinking right now about “Almanac of the Dead,” by Leslie Marmon Silko.)
Further, is not reading just a part of the formation of our subjection to the law? Is it not a way of forcing us into self-governance and passivity? (Thinking of Derrida here.) If you want to look at religion, look at the huge divide between Christians who insist on mediation by the book (fundamentalism) vs. those who cultivate a personal relationship with the divine. And yet, perhaps being a writer can provide a rupture in subjectivity.
3.6 – I agree with you that psychoanalysis needs to be explored. Harlan’s ecopolitical melancholia plays an interesting role in collapsist thinking. The narcissism you mention, too, can be seen as our recoiling from the pain of insecurity and disconnection in capitalism. But I personally give a lot of sway to the repetition compulsion, which can be seen in everything from the Israel / Palestine disaster to our own interpersonal relationships to the way that activists sometimes hurl themselves into prison. Delusion lies in wait. We believe that every time, the story of power, heroics, and oppression is different, when in reality, we play out the same drama over and over between ourselves and our perceived others, only swapping roles here and there. Woman becomes the planet, first abused, then abuser, and then merciful to its favorite (Mad Max) children. Perhaps we fear our aggression toward it, the same as we fear its aggression toward us. Is there a way out of this dynamic altogether? Lots to explore there.
5.1 – Sacrifice: In the short term, it may feel as though we are sacrificing. But in the long term, we are sacrificing consumerism, not emotional happiness. Working 25 hours per week instead of 40 doesn’t seem like a sacrifice. Perhaps we in the Global North sacrifice authority. However, I do think it’s important to recognize the suffering that even the privileged experience under capitalism. It’s of a different quality than people who are not getting their basic needs met, or who are traumatized and murdered and worse by war, but there’s still a great amount of unhappiness among the wealthy, to the point of suicides and high rates of depression, self-hate, and anxiety. The point isn’t to elevate the importance of the rich, which, if anything, should be deemphasized, but rather to note that their suffering will propel us in a direction, whether for better or for worse.
I look forward to your response!
Sophie
Thanks Sophia for raising some more central questions. You say “communism + a large population may very well function without a problem” – correct. Without knowing much about the eo-demographic calculations (almost all of which are based on rightwing Malthusian algorithms and presuppositions anyway) I would think our little planet could easily accommodate 10 billion bodies and souls – but only through communism! For megafauna 10 billion is immense. But then comes the question: can we safely assume humans leave evolutionary history behind? One does not have to subscribe to evolutionary psychology’s justifications of capitalism, sexism, and racism to agree Platonism’s and the Enlightenment’s belief in humanity’s rational, legal, or spiritual emancipation from biology and ecology is exaggerated. The fundamental question Malthus poses, which I think communism has to have the courage to face is, how many billions more? Modernity prides itself on eradicating disease and famine – communism is fully modern too – but at some point – 20 billion? 100 billion? – population IS a problem. We can’t be afraid to think the long term, to think the basic evolutionary mechanisms (which are for humans obviously NEVER ‘blind’) which are ineradicable yet themselves change according to changing long-term environmental pressures and affordances.
Now, the principles I outline here have a strong pro-science drive. I realize that will be off-putting to some. I agree one doesn’t need one iota of science to know the planet is fucked up. Environmental and social injustice can be felt wherever one goes. But I am speaking out for the emancipatory possibilities of science (not art, or even activism and militancy as such) because: 1) these possibilities are threatened by capitalism, 2) much of the radical left is overly suspicious about science, 3) I believe scientists when they say the problems of globalisation will be so dire and complicated that without the reasoned opinions of ‘specialists’ (those Latour so wants to put in their little sociological place), there can be no hope of people feeding themselves sustainably (instead of “Feed the World”-like hypocrisies) and of averting increasing weather catastrophes for the poor. These specialists need to be communist of course, or we just prolong the nasty mess.
“If we use these truths, aren’t they going to bite us back later?” Great question to which Badiou’s Logic of Worlds is one answer. Deciding to base communism on something like evolution (of which functionality and ‘survival of the fittest’ constitute but one badly formulated aspect – cooperation, exuberance, pleasure, daftness are others – nothing dafter than a peacock’s tail) does indeed entail a dice-throw. But it is based on constant vigilance against perversion, betrayal and obscuring of the aims of the movement of communism. So truths probably HAVE to bite us back, and this bite makes us reframe our truths and strategies. Truth is nothing without fidelity to a necessarily changing past of the dedicated present.
Like you I’m hoping for more thorough exchanges between historical materialism and what’s being branded as ‘new materialism’ (corporeal feminism, science studies, actor-network theory, assemblage theory, nonrepresentational geographies, speculative realism, neurophilosophy… – one should also revisit media ecology here). New materialism is new to the precise extent that it disavows the fact that many of its insights were made (albeit in rudimentary, still-idealist form) by Marxists. Worse, new materialism is shit-scared of naming capital the fundamental evil of civilization, or of life itself. So I hope your work will use some of the refreshing elements in new materialism (the critique of sexual and racial difference, for instance, or the critique of Marx’s anthropocentrism and productivism) to replenish not abandon historical materialism. Some who have comparable projects include Marxist Deleuzians like Nick Thoburn and Eugene Holland and a number of radical thinkers around Antonio Negri. None of them, however, address ecology. Guattari addressed many of the pitfalls of historical materialism decades ago, and he gave due attention to ecological and planetary issues.
Liberty, liberation, freedom of action and thought… these are, at the end of the day, the great themes of liberalism (Rousseau, Robespierre et al.), which some socialisms and anarchisms radicalized when it became apparent liberty is very particular not universal. Moreover, it’s precisely the bourgeois definition of freedom that oppresses the masses of people economically, through buttressing and enabling private property and accumulation. Liberalism has a kind of necessary place in conceiving leftwing politics, I think. But freedom as a rallying cry, freedom as priority, is now a couple of centuries over date.
And I think it’s anarchism not communism that on an abstract level tends to fascism ! Or rather microfascism, in D&G’s sense, an urge to cultural essentiality independent of state repression and organized ideology. As I replied to Neel, because anarchism has to distrust any universal project of organizing global solidarity, it will essentially end up drawing a distinction between the inside of a ‘community’ (I avoid the word), which works according to immanent criteria of sustainable production and interpersonal trust, and the big bad outside, which it resists at all cost. As you intimate, I find no sense of an international constructive PROJECT in anarchism or insurrectionism. Changing a mode of production cannot happen without some leadership and institutions. Of course I’m caricaturing here, and I agree that the hangover of twentieth-century state communism makes it difficult to conceive of how propaganda, science, education, and agitation have to interact to progressively convince cities and countries to chuck capitalist regimes… The debate between communism and anarchism is probably internal to revolutionary politics itself.
[…] Saldanha, A. (2013). Some Principles of Geocommunism. Retrieved from: http://geocritique.org/arun-saldanha-some-principles-of-geocommunism/ […]
Arun,
First and foremost, a sincere thanks for writing such a provocative piece. I’ve been mulling it over in my head for the past week and a half, especially as my most recent readings have brought me into the orbit of intensely bleak thinkers like Cioran, with whom I’m trying to find my way towards a kind of liberation in decay. And despite the vast gulf in tone and tenor between Cioran and your piece, a question (not directly inspired by Cioran) concerning temporalities did crop up for me.
The issue of time (or differential times) is a constant presence throughout your piece. In your discussion of secular eschatology, for example, you advocate ‘[taking] full advantage of the contradictions within the alarmist affects and narratives’ of socio-ecological ruination (4.4). And in a similar vein you suggest, ‘Stoicism’s concern is not the flourishing of individuality nor the warmth of community or holistic ecosystem, but the constant rising up to the challenge that the next day may be one’s last’ (5.2). Here, one might get a sense of a kairological intervention/opportunity to be seized upon.
Alongside this framing of temporality as a matter of urgency and opportunity, you also suggest ‘patience in mobilization’, retroactivity, anticipation, striving for an eternal revolution’ (6.1-6.3) – all of which conjure a chronological interpretation of temporality, with a geocommunist project unfolding in time, albeit not, as you suggest, in a linear manner. Now there’s always an interesting discussion to be had on the relationship between kairos and chronos in the context of a revolutionary politics. However, I think your central premise of a geocommunist project necessarily pushes beyond this coupling in its emphasis on the prefix “geo” – a move that forces us to take into account much more massively distributed temporal frameworks that have not too frequently been considered in radical political discourses.
Put differently, if the Anthropocene is posited as the material and theoretical ground of any concept of social justice, this would also seem to imply that temporalities of climate, oceans, geology, etc. must also feature into this material and theoretical ground. My question, however, deals with how the deep-seated, radical ‘indifference’ of, say, geological time operates in and through much more compressed conceptions of time central to a revolutionary politics. (Granted, you touch upon this in 6.4, but I’m left wanting a bit more as this seems to be one of the central issues to a geocommunist politics.) Thus, in what ways can geologic time be mobilized politically under geocommunism? Does the conjuncture that geocommunism seems to represent – a kind of harmonizing (but not equilibristic!) point in space and time where assorted materialities converge – risk re-inscribing a kind of anthropocentric stake on the world, albeit it in agreeable terms from the perspective of a radical politics? And, if this is the case, is there anything ‘wrong’ with re-inscriptions, inversions, and profanations of anthropocentricism?
Again, thanks immensely for this, Arun. It’s an exciting intervention in its own right.
Looking forward to hearing from you,
Harlan
Thanks Harlan for some perceptive remarks and references. It’s an excellent idea to return to ‘intensely bleak’ thinkers like Emil Cioran representing the darkest tendencies of Romanticism and the modern artistic and intellectual temperament. Schopenhauer is definitely going to make comebacks. We will have to deal with the inherent Orientalist, nationalist, fascist, theosophical issues such thinkers throw up. I don’t know much about them but I do think pessimism, misanthropy, nihilism, cynicism, relativism (all these can be found in Asian philosophers too) are crucial avenues of thought, to understand inside out, IN ORDER TO overcome them. I will probably take a shorter route than you – not to be downright depressed and disgusted with my fellow humans – and already accept painful Nietzsche’s conclusion that the intensely bleak is finally another ideology of resentment and self-inflation, usually racist, elitist, and paranoid. In apocalypticism I’m fundamentally more attracted to the positive, religious features sort of underneath the gloominess.
The centrality of Nietzsche’s project to modernity, and now the possibility of an infinitely more dramatic showdown than his fin de siècle, both demand some on the left NEED to do the grim work of studying and embodying pessimism. Your empirical work on fascistoid virilities in survivalism lends itself excellently to negotiating the relevance of Cioran’s philosophy, with its basis in the 1930s I see on Wikipedia, to 21st century apocalypse. Good luck and keep grinning! The left is behind you.
On that note I’ve always found black and death metal the best example of how misanthropy and the diabolical in the end CAN flip into something positive countercultural or just funny. At low dosages, that is. This is something Eugene Thacker doesn’t adequately tackle – compare Ronald Bogue’s notes on metal.
It’s a difficult question, whether pessimism or optimism has or should have the final say, and the answer depends entirely on one’s political and ethical adherences. Adorno and fellow ‘Frankfurters’ deserve careful attention in this respect: from the off agitating against fascism and vitalism, Adorno’s pessimism never loses sight of the ultimate possibility of revolution in the face of dark and massive stupidity, although to my taste his sense of revolution (see his recently translated manifesto-like exchanges with Horkheimer) is too intellecto-artistic. We need politics more than, and before, aphorisms.
Your questions about temporality are extremely pertinent. The relevance of the Stoic distinction between chronological corporeal time (Chronos) and metaphysical, incorporeal or transcendental Time (Aion) in Deleuze’s Logic of Sense for understanding the geological conditions of communism is something I should explore.
You’re right that those who started doing something like this, like Negri, have little to say about nonhuman temporalities, restricting chronos to something like capitalist mechanical clock time and forgetting entirely evolutionary, developmental, ecosystemic and climatological time. Negri draws the opposition with kairos (ancient rhetoric’s concept of timeliness and eventfulness, and in Christian theology, the time when God is doing his thing – instants of redemption). But for Deleuze, when time is genuinely ‘out of joint’ it’s no matter of simply outsmarting the clock. The event as an eruption of invisible ever-changing eternity shimmering through and disturbing the tick-tock of everyday life has to come from radically outside the human altogether.
Interestingly, I see now on Wikipedia ‘kairos’ means time-as-weather, even in modern Greek… just like ‘le temps’ in French I guess. So kairos might stand for something like the unmanageable storminess that human time tries to make timely. Still it seems Deleuze prefers aion to kairos because the latter’s association with human inventiveness anthropomorphizes hence restricts the violence that the breakdown of cyclical, linear, common time entails.
You ask “how the deep-seated, radical ‘indifference’ of, say, geological time operates in and through much more compressed conceptions of time central to a revolutionary politics”. I’m not sure I can answer that concisely at this point, except to say that geological time is NOT indifferent to societal longe durée and its suspension in revolution. Ultimately the matter of all politics (colonization and demarcating borders, enforcing taxation, distributing the fruits of the earth) is the planet itself, which is the ‘first’ kind of self-differentiation upon which social formations need to arrange themselves. Obviously there’s a transcendental structure of layers of temporality (Braudel), with geological science having at times, and increasingly, very intimate (oil, climate change, extinction), but often very faint relevance to formulating the demands of revolution. It is simply this essential connection of earth to politics however faint that needs to be asserted.
And you’re right – retaining a concept of human agency is essential. The call for a minimal humanism is a (probably still clumsy) way to signal that my intention is not to strictly avoid over-‘naturalizing’ or mystifying the nonhuman untimeliness of revolution: it is to avoid a purely contemplative passive Deleuzian position in which aion is the nonhuman tellurian realm crashing upon us like little tsunamis of unpredictability without there being any chance of finding species-specific rhythms or interventions to swim along them. Yet this should not be read as bringing in anthropocentrism through the back door, because the ‘minimal’ in ‘minimal humanism’ means we FIRST accept with physical science the enormity of non- and even antihuman agency, then return to one of philosophy’s initial questions: right, in that case, what do we do?
All the best
Arun
[…] http://geocritique.org/arun-saldanha-some-principles-of-geocommunism/ […]
[…] http://geocritique.org/arun-saldanha-some-principles-of-geocommunism/ […]
[…] http://geocritique.org/arun-saldanha-some-principles-of-geocommunism/ […]
Thanks, Arun, for an inventive and provocative series of theses on “geocommunism.” You convincingly argue that climate change and
other capitalist forms of environmental destruction present a pressing horizon
for revolutionary thought and action. And by naming the carbon economy a
“racist biopolitical entity” you draw attention to the ways in which
the so-called anthropocene cannot simply be understood as an aggregated
violence of human against nonhuman, but a form of expropriation coordinated by
a “minority” at the expense of the mass of humans as well as other
species. In the face of the mathematical sublime of anthropocene discourse, the
“geo” of geocommunism forces a reckoning with the deeply unequal
rescalings of space, time, and energy unleashed by the carbon economy.
I have a couple of main lines of thought that press on some
of your arguments, especially in the later parts of the manifesto. First, I
have concerns about what appears to be a naïve faith in the governing potential
of apocalyptic spectacle. Arguing for a “secularized eschatology,”
you hope to appropriate apocalyptic vision for revolutionary ends. While a
variety of environmental artists have begun to effectively explore the many
possibilities of visions of ecological crisis and disaster, mobilizing
spectacle to resurrect vanguardist discipline seems at least as fascist as the
one-world spectacles of the era of neoliberal “globalization.” (It is
puzzling to read this from the author of PSYCHEDELIC WHITE, which brilliantly
situates the New Age tribalism of the Goa trance scene within the microfascist
racial policing of bodies. Though I’m not surprised that you would depart from
the critical nostalgia of Marxist critics of postmodernity who denounce the
violence of the spectacle.)
You mention that spectacles of environmental destruction and
the extinction of humanity are being used in the service of establishing new
forms of greenwashing, but there are more fundamental problems. Apocalpytic
vision defers a crisis that extinguishes and dispossesses now, that has already
inhered in our bodies and the bodies of other species, fundamentally
transforming life itself and the planetary relations between life and matter.
It often refuses the ways in which bodies already live in interspecies
assemblage (Haraway; Margulis and Sagan) by positing humanity as a presence
that can be removed from a unified nature. It refers us back to anthropocentric
vision that imagines the ruins of settler society as the form of extinction
rather than thinking through how life (especially the precarious life of the
dispossessed) will inevitably differently, how bodies, unequal communities, and
“the human” as species are already mutating into other forms under
400 ppm carbon.
This raises a second concern: why retain even a “minimal
humanism”? In discourses of the so-called anthropocene, the human is not
self-identical. “Human” agencies disperse through other species of
life and matter, such that heat-trapping atmospheric carbon, deforesting
insects, and invasive viruses, to name a few examples, all emerge as signs of
that ultimate parasite, the human. Yet these unruly vitalities travel along
lines of flight that disrupt the reproduction of that very human. At the same
time, revolutionary potential itself emerges from the collision of human labor and
the forces of other species assembled into energy networks, as Tim Mitchell has
argued in CARBON DEMOCRACY. I understand the desire to reject the nihilism of
those who seek a cosmic judgment against Man for his sins, as well as the
imperialist idealism of much new materialist criticism. Yet I would still argue
that other possible worlds are lost for a geocommunism that recenters
anthropocentric vision. To me (admitting my anarchist tendencies), the human
and the vanguard appear to be archaic elements of a 19th century
communism that would have to be replaced for a 21st century
geocommunism.
Huge thanks to Neel for kicking off the discussion!
A few responses.
– Manipulating apocalyptic imaginations (including its “spectacles” – that’s your addition though) in the service of anticapitalism cannot be done lightly and indeed runs a risk – it’s playing with fire. But if we take the religious meanings of apocalypse seriously – etymologically “revelation”, yep like the book in the Bible – it’s exactly the opposite of what mainstream apocalypticism does. For every religion (though clearest in Christianity) the realisation the end of the world is nigh cannot make humans carry on as before. They are materially forced to reckon: what are the sins that have brought them to this sorry state? The question of judgment – this is good, this is evil – and the question of imminence – this shit is happening RIGHT NOW, in our very bodies as you say – are both absolutely central to the notion itself of apocalypse.
The idea one gets from Psychedelic White is that judgment and religiosity are inherently fascist. But discovering the complexity of the Kantian and Marxist legacies makes me think differently now. I’m atheist, of course, but religion provides an allegorical framework for understanding the enormous issues humanity is facing.
Conclusion: within a serious appreciation of apocalypse the greenwashing you mention is uncovered as the ugliest hypocrisy – just more sin speeding up the end. Yes, apocalypse justifies things like geoengineering, but it’s my hypothesis this is totally illogical and evil. Perhaps this is a naive faith in the potentially radical possibilities of end of the world scenarios. But somewhere naiveté (belief is a better word) has an indispensable place. The big problem you point at is that most Christianity as well as Hollywood catastrophism and spiritualist environmentalism are all nowhere close to taking apocalypse as seriously as I am advocating – genuflecting as they do to capitalist culture. Geocommunism beats apocalypticism on its own turf.
– Margulis and other recent antideterminist evolutionary theorists should not be used for a misplaced optimism in the creativity of life, I think. Of course life forms are mutating already under 400 ppm – they have done so for 4 bn years, and now probably faster than ever before. But that’s not good, that’s scary, stupid, and likely to hurt poor populations.
Geocommunism isn’t about extracting the human “level” from within the endosymbiotic entanglements of life, earth, atmosphere and solar energy, but understanding those entanglements in order to take responsibility as humans, or rather, as particular political collectivities. To cut a long story short, I’ve come to accept there’s a lack of a focused attention to political-organisational (as opposed to ethical-spiritual) responsibility in the likes of Jane Bennett, Brian Massumi, Isabel Stengers, the later Donna Haraway, and most evolutionary biology itself, precisely by staying with the entanglement and not making the step to actual politics – practices which aim to change the socio-ecological system of capitalism. This lack was always pointed out by critics, of course, but I needed to engage new forms of post-poststructuralist Marxism to understand it properly. Say no to anthropocentrism only if it makes your politics more effective!
– Hence the idea of a minimal humanism (related to a minimal positivism). The flat-out critique of humanism (whether in feminism, psychoanalysis, the nonhuman turn, Derridean “posthumanities”, postcolonial theory, D&G etc etc) not only tends to forget its historical debt to humanism but struggles to present any workable model of politics, since politics is done only by humans last time I checked, which will be denied by some of the extreme zoophiles.
All I’m saying, antihumanism cannot be the conclusion. Of course I agree with antihumanism (especially Althusser, Foucault, Badiou) that celebrating the human as such, as a unity, is fundamental to power and capital. But there’s just too much writing and thinking of a sophisticated and subtle subversive quality in the Enlightenment and Renaissance (as well as in Islam and bits of universalism in Asian religions though I know less about these) to call myself antihumanist. It’s too easy, or rather, too morose and too adolescent-boy-like, to completely dissolve the site from which ethics and politics are launched into a cosmic maelstrom or black hole of blindly inhuman annihilation, as the speculative-realist scifi-Romantic neo-nihilists do.
– Ah yes anarchist. That evidently makes you wary about pleas for centring decision, direction, determination into a collective global human subjectivity. Your intellectual task is, then, to reconceive anarchist politics under the anthropocene against geocommunism! How will anarchism not be localist? How will electricity and plastic condoms reach the anarchist “communities”? I’m all ears!
Best
arun
Briefly:
Thanks for helping to clarify the stakes! I agree with your
points on vitalist ethics and the impossibility of a revolutionary project that transcends humanism. Yet to ground the universal in “human” thought and language, and to narrow the political to “only humans,” seems less consistent with keeping humanism “minimal.” Technologies and interspecies embodiments assemble the political.
I’ll have to think more about apocalypse. Are you reading Euguene
Thacker? I understand how philosophically apocalypse offers a limit to certain forms of thought, but I’m not yet clear on how it works politically, especially across uneven geographies.
I would emphasize in anarchism not the structural focus on
decentralization, but the political stance against domination as well as seeking to build commons over vanguards. Environmental movements have real reasons to work from within existing, ecologically precarious spaces to rebuild commons against capitalist expropriation. I’m no purist — we must press now for top-down action against climate change. But that doesn’t actually require a revolutionary program, and the supply crisis rather than authoritarian discipline is the surest route to reduced consumption. Force the hand of the neoliberal state by sabotaging fracked/cracked hydrocarbon infrastructures.
[…] themes by the site’s editors and guest contributors, such as Arun’s recent work on Geo-Communism. Kathryn Yusoff, in her new capacity as reviews and open-site editor at Society and Space has also […]