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Normally I find myself agreeing with Brian’s posts, so its an odd
feeling to be at odds with your recent ones. When Vincent wrote
‘where is the surplus’ I didn’t take that as meaning where is the
kit, plans (of which there are endless shelves), materials and
people, but where is the power. What is it that people can draw on
to create change. If anything the disconnect between the immense
wealth (and immense pollution) generated by Capital and the global
surplus population hammers home the question: how are we to take
the two and create change.
Often there are dismissals of ‘local’, small or immediate scales
(that society can’t be made in a utopian way as you write),
followed by calls for either state action or a global leviathan -
both as old as the first campaigns against climate change (and, as
Doreen Massey noted, part of a logic of globalisation where the
global creates the local as an impoverished and powerless scale).
I’d suggest the global political scale imagined as necessary is
really less than that - it is a technocratic artefact born from a
particular way of seeing the world, one that comes from how we
‘see’ climate change. Scaling is a misleading concept - while
climate change is a planetary problem, this does not require a
global solution, or even a singular solution.
There are a myriad of scales, sites, and networks between the
nation and the individual household. There are endless
possibilities for change. Tackling the principle corporate actors
would be a good start. Building on the power of those actors who
the nation-state often responds to and tries to contain with tame
reforms - from activist, community and indigenous groups to trade
unions and NGOs - would be another approach. Not merely to put
pressure on government, but to start to go in, against and
critically beyond the state. Ways of life must be changed, most
for the better, but what needs to change will be radically
different from place to place around the world.
Government has failed systematically for decades now. People have
been calling for the creation - or emergence - of movements to put
pressure on the nation-state for just as long. I don’t think
change must begin with nation-states. I think if anything the
obsession within environmental circles with the nation-state stems
more from a lack of faith in our collective capacities to
self-organise than any sense that taking over the nation-state is
any real solution. Reaching for the magic state button won’t help
at this point. Do we really think we have the time to build these
movements, get into power, work through the muck of governmental
mechanisms, then implement policies and legislation? We are past
that slow march. We need plans, and sites of struggle, but they
have to be at other scales at this point imho. This doesn’t mean
not engaging in forms of governance (particularly at regional and
city levels), nor not aiming to shape policy and governance. It
does mean not making the nation-state and global governance the
focus of any radical anthropocene politics.
nicholas
On 06/01/2019 03:44, Brian Holmes
wrote:
Your wording is interesting, because it connects
"emergence" with the "state". Since the classical
concept of emergence evolved around self-organization,
it was decentralist. The state is a (more or less)
centralist concept. The way you put it, it sounds as
if you didn't have one particular state in mind, but a
global concept of statehood that can enact global
policies.
Well, I must not put it very
clearly then. I think it should begin with national
states. I mostly speak about the US, because I am a
citizen and because the US is big enough to set production
standards and exert technological and organizational
leadership. This would be of enormous benefit to all other
countries that are trying to decarbonize. But mind you,
Germany's efforts, self-contradictory as they are, have
already been of great benefit. China, too, can set
production standards, but it's totally undemocratic, a bad
pathway in my view, at least for the so-called West.
De facto world governance is multilateralism. It's exerted
on a case-by-case basis, mostly as needed for global
interoperability issues (for example, air-traffic control,
see icao.int).
Multilateral agreements are crucial to climate change
policy, witness Kyoto, Paris, etc: I would not suggest
throwing those out. But they cannot be expected to work
before some large nations provide viable examples. As for
de jure world government, it appears impossible either
politically or even militarily. There was a big push for
it after WWII and it failed.
When I say the desire to change the
energy grid is emergent, it just means that very many
people are thinking about it, forming organizations,
pushing for laws, exploring technical inventions, forging
concepts and metrics, etc. The point is to make those
things into national policy. Multilateralism will follow.
The physics of dissipative structures tells us that
emergent behavior precedes a phase change: "order out of
chaos," to quote the title of a great book. Many
complexity theorists have adopted that notion. I
frequently used it to talk about the crystallization of a
new techno-economic paradigm after a major crisis (it
actually happened after 2008 in China, but not yet in
Euro-America). I think that the physics language is only
metaphorical though.
Gumbrecht's characterization of
Trump as an "impulse-driven activist without a
world-picture" is perfect, but his conclusion--basically,
"well, we are cooked anyway"--is both lamentable and
irrelevant. As the world heats up, actions will be taken.
Of course there is no guarantee whatsoever about which
actions, with which results. The way I see it, the "we are
cooked" position just leaves intellectuals some free time
before the beginning of massive interstate conflict over
climate-change consequences, which will clearly happen
under a business-as-usual scenario. In the meantime they
can enjoy the news from the southern borders, where
piecemeal carnage is already going on. Such a position is
undignified. It demands that I destroy in my own self so
many ideals, principles, norms, psychic constructs,
affects - I just can't do it. Life would lose its savor.
Far better to work towards better outcomes.
Actually I find the website that
runs intermittently on solar power much more enjoyable
than the Spiegel article, thank you!
best, Brian
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