It occurs to me that a brief interlude to set the tone of this reboot is probably in order.
Any frank discussion of the ecological limits of human civilization is going to come across as dark and cynical, because we live in a society that takes perpetual growth and technological advance as both given and ultimately desirable. It's impossible to overstate how ubiquitous this is in western thought; everyone, and I mean everyone, from Democrats to Republicans to fascists to communists to lizard people, have internalized the narrative of perpetual growth to a significant extent.
When I say "industrial society is coming to a close", people hear "we're all gonna die", but what I really mean is "the current state of affairs can't continue, so something else is going to happen." And given how much industrialism kinda sucks, I view this as a positive development on the whole. The transition to that something else is likely to be a bumpy ride, because as I've stated here before, the transition is going to be uncontrolled and unplanned, but I actually have a great deal of optimism for where we'll wind up. The Earth is a supremely adaptable system, and we as species are without a doubt the most adaptable component of that system.
So while I have no doubt that industrial capitalism is headed for the dustbin, I also have no doubt that human culture, and humanity itself, are not. Every so often I see someone say that humanity will be extinct in the next one hundred to five hundred years, and my response is always barely polite laughter.
Near-term human extinction is bullshit. Short of a random cosmological event, a gamma-ray burst or truly massive asteroid impact, something that strips the Earth's atmosphere or liquefies the crust, I expect humanity to be able survive basically any conceivable insult. Every lineage on the planet has survived at least six mass extinction events, including the dinosaurs (which were not actually wiped out 65 million years ago; I have one sitting on a perch not five feet from me as I type this), and none of those lineages had the ability to modify self and environment to the point of being able to colonize literally every biome on the planet. Something would have to happen that is capable of sterilizing all multi-cellular life on Earth before humanity is rubbed out.
I don't think even humanity is capable of causing human extinction; even deliberate genocide failed to exterminate Native Americans, Jews, Armenians, Kurds, or Tutsis, to name but a few of the peoples who live on despite thorough attempts to eliminate them. A carefully designed super plague might come close, but anything lethal enough to
threaten the species will burn itself out without reaching the most
isolated communities. There are 7.5 billion of us, and with few exceptions, every one of those billions turn their considerable wit and adaptability to the challenge of survival, every day.
So there WILL be a future. And humans being humans, that future will involve music, love, stories, and booze, so it'll be pretty neat, all told. The transition will be hard, and weathering it with as many of our friends and loved ones as possible is the topic of this blog, but I'm not pessimistic, and I hope you aren't either.
Saturday, April 30, 2016
Tuesday, April 26, 2016
The 2016 Election: This is why we're fucked.
As old followers of this blog (or folks who've perused the archives)
likely know, I used to be a member of the Communist Party, USA. When I
left that organization in late 2014, it was largely over disagreements
with how the organization itself was led (I prefer my democratic
centralism with some democracy, thanks); however, there were some pretty
dramatic disagreements over strategy, as well, and leaving the CPUSA
has giving me and my comrades here in the Pacific Northwest a chance to
develop our own.
In a nutshell, the strategic disagreement is this: the CPUSA's main line of attack against capitalism is trying to encourage incremental change through support of Democratic candidates against Republican ones. Recognizing that a third-party electoral challenge is not, at the moment, likely to be successful, the CPUSA has elected to go the "lesser of two evils" route by supporting a party that, while pro-capitalist, is at least on paper in favor of some social programs. They hope that these programs can be expanded into socialism, a strategy frequently referred to as "reformism".
My last post four years ago was actually something of a crosspost; it was a piece I co-wrote for the People's World, the newspaper of the Communist Party, USA. The "Why We Fight" essay was an attempt to describe how a second term Obama Presidency would finally take substantial action on climate change; it was, in other words, a defense of a reformist strategy.
Well, President Obama did win reelection, and the linchpin of his climate change agenda is the Paris Agreement, signed by an overwhelming majority of countries just last week. It is indeed an impressive feat of international horsetrading, and it's clear that President Obama made it a significant priority for his administration. That's not nothing. The agreement calls on signatory nations to make an effort to limit global mean temperature increase to 2 ̊C by the end of the century, which is a laudable goal.
However, the agreement is nonbinding. There is no enforcement mechanism. The Fifth Assesment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published in late 2013, predicts that a 2 ̊C anomaly by the end of the 21st century is almost certain; the Paris Agreement is DOA.
Democratic policy is, as it so often is, "feel good" policy.
Greg and I spent a good portion of the "Why We Fight" piece describing the different rhetoric of the two US political parties around climate change, and we were correct; the Republicans continue to act as if climate change is not a problem, while the Democrats (especially, this time around, Bernie Sanders) publicly wring their hands about it. But there is no reason to expect that another Democratic President would be any more effective than Barack Obama has been at taking meaningful action. Because the office of the Presidency simply does not have the power to do more than slap the occasional band-aid on the problem, and even that requires a tractable congress and international cooperation.
It's past time to come to terms with the fact that global capitalism will not "solve" climate change. It will be destroyed by climate change. Whatever we build in the ruins, whatever we preserve for the future, will have to take into account the substantial changes to the Earth system that are now, for all intents and purposes, inevitable.
Which is why you won't find me talking about national politics on this blog very much from here on out. Until national collective action on climate change and peak oil appears possible, let alone likely, my focus will remain local.
Which brings me to that strategic disagreement I mentioned earlier. A vocal minority within the CPUSA was critical of reformist strategy, because one need only look at the trajectory of national US politics since 1980 or so to realize that both mainstream US political parties are tacking hard to the right, making any attempt at reformism a losing proposition. To a certain extent, picking the lesser of two options seems like a no brainer; no one was suggesting voting for Republicans. But the critics pointed out that if national politics (specifically the pit for money and volunteer energy that is a US Presidential race) offers you two options, "lose", and "lose worse", then maybe it's time to consider a different field of struggle entirely.
Several of us advocated for a grassroots strategy of building working class institutions to provide support and services that are being increasingly cutoff by both Republican and Democratic government officials. This is not an electoral strategy at all, but rather a community-based strategy: by helping working-class people build mechanisms of community support, be they free schools, cooperative childcare, food shares, or what have you, you simultaneously build a sense of agency and power in the working class, and reduce the dependency of that class on wages and handouts from the ruling class.
In short, you build a class with the consciousnesses and resources to challenge capitalist power directly, rather than in a two-party electoral struggle where everything is in the ruling class's terms.
You also build community resilience against climate change and peak oil, without relying on mainstream political efforts.
It's that last point that makes this whole topic relevant to the project of this blog. In coming posts I'll talk about specific projects my comrades and I pursue as part of our community strategy, which we've taken to calling Dual Power. More on this later!
In a nutshell, the strategic disagreement is this: the CPUSA's main line of attack against capitalism is trying to encourage incremental change through support of Democratic candidates against Republican ones. Recognizing that a third-party electoral challenge is not, at the moment, likely to be successful, the CPUSA has elected to go the "lesser of two evils" route by supporting a party that, while pro-capitalist, is at least on paper in favor of some social programs. They hope that these programs can be expanded into socialism, a strategy frequently referred to as "reformism".
My last post four years ago was actually something of a crosspost; it was a piece I co-wrote for the People's World, the newspaper of the Communist Party, USA. The "Why We Fight" essay was an attempt to describe how a second term Obama Presidency would finally take substantial action on climate change; it was, in other words, a defense of a reformist strategy.
Well, President Obama did win reelection, and the linchpin of his climate change agenda is the Paris Agreement, signed by an overwhelming majority of countries just last week. It is indeed an impressive feat of international horsetrading, and it's clear that President Obama made it a significant priority for his administration. That's not nothing. The agreement calls on signatory nations to make an effort to limit global mean temperature increase to 2 ̊C by the end of the century, which is a laudable goal.
However, the agreement is nonbinding. There is no enforcement mechanism. The Fifth Assesment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published in late 2013, predicts that a 2 ̊C anomaly by the end of the 21st century is almost certain; the Paris Agreement is DOA.
Democratic policy is, as it so often is, "feel good" policy.
Greg and I spent a good portion of the "Why We Fight" piece describing the different rhetoric of the two US political parties around climate change, and we were correct; the Republicans continue to act as if climate change is not a problem, while the Democrats (especially, this time around, Bernie Sanders) publicly wring their hands about it. But there is no reason to expect that another Democratic President would be any more effective than Barack Obama has been at taking meaningful action. Because the office of the Presidency simply does not have the power to do more than slap the occasional band-aid on the problem, and even that requires a tractable congress and international cooperation.
It's past time to come to terms with the fact that global capitalism will not "solve" climate change. It will be destroyed by climate change. Whatever we build in the ruins, whatever we preserve for the future, will have to take into account the substantial changes to the Earth system that are now, for all intents and purposes, inevitable.
Which is why you won't find me talking about national politics on this blog very much from here on out. Until national collective action on climate change and peak oil appears possible, let alone likely, my focus will remain local.
Which brings me to that strategic disagreement I mentioned earlier. A vocal minority within the CPUSA was critical of reformist strategy, because one need only look at the trajectory of national US politics since 1980 or so to realize that both mainstream US political parties are tacking hard to the right, making any attempt at reformism a losing proposition. To a certain extent, picking the lesser of two options seems like a no brainer; no one was suggesting voting for Republicans. But the critics pointed out that if national politics (specifically the pit for money and volunteer energy that is a US Presidential race) offers you two options, "lose", and "lose worse", then maybe it's time to consider a different field of struggle entirely.
Several of us advocated for a grassroots strategy of building working class institutions to provide support and services that are being increasingly cutoff by both Republican and Democratic government officials. This is not an electoral strategy at all, but rather a community-based strategy: by helping working-class people build mechanisms of community support, be they free schools, cooperative childcare, food shares, or what have you, you simultaneously build a sense of agency and power in the working class, and reduce the dependency of that class on wages and handouts from the ruling class.
In short, you build a class with the consciousnesses and resources to challenge capitalist power directly, rather than in a two-party electoral struggle where everything is in the ruling class's terms.
You also build community resilience against climate change and peak oil, without relying on mainstream political efforts.
It's that last point that makes this whole topic relevant to the project of this blog. In coming posts I'll talk about specific projects my comrades and I pursue as part of our community strategy, which we've taken to calling Dual Power. More on this later!
Saturday, April 23, 2016
Socialism or barbarism?
Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to Socialism or regression into Barbarism.
- Rosa Luxemburg, "Junius Pamphlet" 1916
Luxemburg's turn of phrase, while certainly apt in the tumultuous years of the First World War, take on a special significance for us in the 21st century. We are, indeed, at a crossroads.
Before its long hiatus, this blog spent a great deal of time laying out, in occasionally morbid detail, exactly why industrial society faces the end of business as usual.
To briefly recap: The explosive growth in technological advancement and productivity of the years since the Industrial Revolution were made possible by fossil fuels. It's been argued that the economic complexity of any society is directly proportional to the energy that is available to that society, all else being equal. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, all human societies were limited, ultimately, to the energy available from the sun. Less technologically sophisticated societies might be limited to human muscle power; more sophisticated to animal muscle power; and still more sophisticated might utilize mechanically amplified wind and water power. All of these societies, however, were ultimately limited by the amount of energy entering the Earth system each year from the sun, which provides the energy to grow crops to feed humans and animals, and ultimately drives the weather systems that bring wind and fill reservoirs.
The Industrial Revolution made available the Earth's fossil fuels, which represented literally millions upon millions of years of stored solar energy, in the form of fossilized plant matter from long-gone eras. Humanity, previously limited to finding more efficient ways to utilize a limited but (for our purposes) perpetual energy budget, had quite literally won the energy lottery. A gigantic, one-time sum of concentrated fuel, allowing humanity, for a time, to attain power levels far greater than the sum of available solar energy in the Earth system.
This paradigm-changing event was a qualitative change in human society. It's no coincidence that the latest great Revolution, the overthrow of Feudalism by Capitalism, was pushed over the edge by fossil fuels. The bourgeoisie, in its time a revolutionary class, sought to find more ingenious ways of harnessing this new energy, and a new, heightened level of exploitation it made possible. Fossil energy did for the exploitation of the laboring classes what the cotton gin did for slavery in the United States; it was possible to squeeze more productivity from fewer workers. This set the stage for the new class contradictions of the Industrial Age, the stage on which the drama of humanity has played ever since.
But while this bonanza of incredible energy has persisted long enough to completely alter the fabric of human society, long enough that no one now alive can remember when humanity was limited to the renewable power from the sun, and endless growth is central mantra of of our culture, it must come to an end, is coming to an end, as described in these pages and the sources we cite.
If capitalism is the result and vassal of nearly limitless fossil energy, what happens when we run out?
Socialism or barbarism.
In his analysis of the primary contradiction of capitalism, Marx pointed out that capitalism was a necessary predecessor of socialism, and ultimately communism, because it was through capitalism that the productive processes of human labor were centralized and organized, in a fashion that is necessary for a society managed for the common good. However, I don't think Marx fully realized the transitory nature of this; that the socialized production created by capitalism and necessary for communism was dependent on fossil energy, which by definition was always a limited resource.
If Marx was correct in presuming that socialism must be built on the substrate of a functioning capitalist economy, it may be too late. The classic revolutionary model of "seize state power and build socialism from the top down", already a strategy with a dubious history, is unlikely to be workable in any case as the central organization of production made possible by fossil energy flies apart in the face of climate pressure and peak oil.
Do we, then, consign ourselves to Luxemburg's barbarism, a Mad Max future of hideous wars fought over depleting resources? I'm not prepared to do that.
Which brings us to this here re-rebooted blog. I've been through a lot in the last four years, since my shared project with Kir'Shara ground to a halt amidst existential despair. Which was probably an inevitable result of a project that, let's be honest, fairly wallowed in doom-porn. Trying to convince people that society is fucked is not the most emotionally fulfilling thing to do with one's time, after all. And in that time, I've developed some ideas for what individuals and small groups of people can do to prepare themselves and their communities for the coming Dark Age.
Seldon's Gate is a name inspired by the notion that a relatively small handful of people can build something that will last into a future that, while grim, carries the promise of rebirth. It's a small project, a personal project, but it seems appropriate to chronicle it here. So this blog will be a mixture of personal log, theoretical sandbox, and practical guide to building community and hope in increasingly shitty times.
I don't know if you'll learn anything, but I hope you'll be entertained.
- Rosa Luxemburg, "Junius Pamphlet" 1916
Luxemburg's turn of phrase, while certainly apt in the tumultuous years of the First World War, take on a special significance for us in the 21st century. We are, indeed, at a crossroads.
Before its long hiatus, this blog spent a great deal of time laying out, in occasionally morbid detail, exactly why industrial society faces the end of business as usual.
To briefly recap: The explosive growth in technological advancement and productivity of the years since the Industrial Revolution were made possible by fossil fuels. It's been argued that the economic complexity of any society is directly proportional to the energy that is available to that society, all else being equal. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, all human societies were limited, ultimately, to the energy available from the sun. Less technologically sophisticated societies might be limited to human muscle power; more sophisticated to animal muscle power; and still more sophisticated might utilize mechanically amplified wind and water power. All of these societies, however, were ultimately limited by the amount of energy entering the Earth system each year from the sun, which provides the energy to grow crops to feed humans and animals, and ultimately drives the weather systems that bring wind and fill reservoirs.
The Industrial Revolution made available the Earth's fossil fuels, which represented literally millions upon millions of years of stored solar energy, in the form of fossilized plant matter from long-gone eras. Humanity, previously limited to finding more efficient ways to utilize a limited but (for our purposes) perpetual energy budget, had quite literally won the energy lottery. A gigantic, one-time sum of concentrated fuel, allowing humanity, for a time, to attain power levels far greater than the sum of available solar energy in the Earth system.
This paradigm-changing event was a qualitative change in human society. It's no coincidence that the latest great Revolution, the overthrow of Feudalism by Capitalism, was pushed over the edge by fossil fuels. The bourgeoisie, in its time a revolutionary class, sought to find more ingenious ways of harnessing this new energy, and a new, heightened level of exploitation it made possible. Fossil energy did for the exploitation of the laboring classes what the cotton gin did for slavery in the United States; it was possible to squeeze more productivity from fewer workers. This set the stage for the new class contradictions of the Industrial Age, the stage on which the drama of humanity has played ever since.
But while this bonanza of incredible energy has persisted long enough to completely alter the fabric of human society, long enough that no one now alive can remember when humanity was limited to the renewable power from the sun, and endless growth is central mantra of of our culture, it must come to an end, is coming to an end, as described in these pages and the sources we cite.
If capitalism is the result and vassal of nearly limitless fossil energy, what happens when we run out?
Socialism or barbarism.
In his analysis of the primary contradiction of capitalism, Marx pointed out that capitalism was a necessary predecessor of socialism, and ultimately communism, because it was through capitalism that the productive processes of human labor were centralized and organized, in a fashion that is necessary for a society managed for the common good. However, I don't think Marx fully realized the transitory nature of this; that the socialized production created by capitalism and necessary for communism was dependent on fossil energy, which by definition was always a limited resource.
If Marx was correct in presuming that socialism must be built on the substrate of a functioning capitalist economy, it may be too late. The classic revolutionary model of "seize state power and build socialism from the top down", already a strategy with a dubious history, is unlikely to be workable in any case as the central organization of production made possible by fossil energy flies apart in the face of climate pressure and peak oil.
Do we, then, consign ourselves to Luxemburg's barbarism, a Mad Max future of hideous wars fought over depleting resources? I'm not prepared to do that.
Which brings us to this here re-rebooted blog. I've been through a lot in the last four years, since my shared project with Kir'Shara ground to a halt amidst existential despair. Which was probably an inevitable result of a project that, let's be honest, fairly wallowed in doom-porn. Trying to convince people that society is fucked is not the most emotionally fulfilling thing to do with one's time, after all. And in that time, I've developed some ideas for what individuals and small groups of people can do to prepare themselves and their communities for the coming Dark Age.
Seldon's Gate is a name inspired by the notion that a relatively small handful of people can build something that will last into a future that, while grim, carries the promise of rebirth. It's a small project, a personal project, but it seems appropriate to chronicle it here. So this blog will be a mixture of personal log, theoretical sandbox, and practical guide to building community and hope in increasingly shitty times.
I don't know if you'll learn anything, but I hope you'll be entertained.
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