The Precariat and Climate Justice

[Alex Foti]

For the "Anarchy, Autonomy, Ecology" table and for footnotes (some on
marxian theory of value) please read complete version here:

http://www.greatrecession.info/2009/11/03/the-precarious-question-and-the-climate-struggle/


The Precarious Question and the Climate Struggle
Fighting for Social and Ecological Justice. Because Climate Change
Makes All of Us Precarious.

Alex Foti


Precarity in the Great Recession

The Great Recession is making millions of precarious workers
unemployed. Millions of precarious youth, women, immigrants are being
made redundant. The crisis is swelling the ranks of the precariat, the
new class created by neoliberalism which is the sum of those who are
either unemployed or working under non-standard, temporary, part-time
contracts in service, creative, knowledge industries. Those
responsible for the crisis -- big banks, investment funds, free-market
economists and governments -- whitewash and greenwash without shame
hoping to go on with business as usual. Governments are giving
trillions to the bankers and peanuts to the precarious. Riots and
protests are spreading as a result, also resisting rising
securitarianism and racism, but the fight against political and
economic power to defend society and nature has just begun.

This historic crisis parallels the Great Depression in scope, if not
in depth (extraordinary monetary expansion has so far cushioned the
blow of the financial crisis), and will have similarly far-reaching
socioeconomic and political consequences. From the ashes of early 20th
century free-market liberalism, the Fordist-Keynesian mode of
regulation emerged, ensuring working-class economic inclusion into
mass consumerism via high wages and social integration via extensive
welfare-state provisions. From the ashes of early 21st century
free-market liberalism, a new form of social and political regulation
of the economy will have to emerge if the crisis is to find a
democratic solution. In fact, just like in the interwar period,
especially in Europe, the danger of authoritarian and xenophobic
solutions to the Big Crisis is significant.

Today's crisis marks the end of Neoliberal-Hayekian regulation, as
imposed over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, thanks to the seminal
political work done by Reagan, Thatcher, Deng, Pinochet in the two
hemispheres. But this once-in-a-century crisis occurs in the scary
geoclimatic setting of Anthropocene, the man-made geological age
triggered by the extremely rapid burning of fossil fuels in order to
feed capital accumulation. The climate crisis is becoming
frighteningly apparent, from polar caps to river deltas, from
temperate plains to tropical forests. Millions of species are dying,
millions of people are being displaced by droughts and floods. From
the likes of Gore and Stern it's hard to expect a veritable solution
to the causes of climate change, since this would mean to confront the
major carbon emitters, such as energy conglomerates, manufacturing
corporations and their logistics, the aviation industry, fast food and
agribusiness, mass tourism, in essence to shelve global, free-trade
capitalism as we have known it since the Fall of the Wall. Turned
liberals, most greens today just lack the political teeth needed to
confront squarely corporate capitalism for its double responsibility
in the economic and ecological crises. If anything, they are for green
capitalism. So it falls onto the anarchists, feminists, precarious,
immigrants, on those radical actors that have a stake in subverting
the present financial order, to fight for real climate justice, to
bring the economy back under the control of polities and communities,
so that bioregional and atmospheric balances and constraints are
respected.

The Great Recession, just like the Great Depression three generations
ago, is a major demand crisis leading to mass unemployment and
underemployment. It won't be solved until the collective fruits of
social productivity finally accrue to the employed and unemployed
instead of managers and financiers. This requires massive fiscal
redistribution from the tiny élites to the precarious multitudes. Free
public health and education, basic income and leisure expansion, green
jobs and new labor and property laws are the first-aid tools to
address the crisis and ferry us toward a postcapitalist society, where
corporations and investment banks are dismantled, credit is
socialized, copyright is abolished, culture and knowledge are freely
shared, the global economy is regionalized, food distribution networks
are localized, energy production is decentralized, and political power
is federalized, in regional and transnational federations of
autonomous cities and liberated lands.

The issue of the distribution of productivity is crucial. The
structural cause of the Great Recession lies in the failure of
neoliberalism to distribute the productivity growth afforded by the
digital revolution to large strata of society, who then had to take on
debt to finance consumption of the new informational goods and
services. Green capitalism wants to solve the economic crisis via
green jobs and a new welfare system, but it will succeed in its task,
only if it manages to widely redistribute what Negri and Hardt call
"common wealth" i.e. the backlog of collective inventions, creations,
relations and desires presently appropriated by Gates, Murdoch,
Berlusconi, and the like.

The debate is open among leftists about whether green capitalism is
economically sustainable (possibly so), and if so, if will lead to
ecological sustainability (hardly so). Ecomarxists, for whom the labor
theory of value is dogma, believe that the ecological crisis entails a
squeeze in the rate of surplus value and thus a tendency for the rate
of profit to fall*. Empirically, if productivity declines because of
the ecological crisis, due to increases in the cost of energy or to
the internalization (inclusion in the business cost of products and
services) of the environmental damages caused by the economic process,
then ecomarxists are right and green capitalism is unsustainable due
to falling profits. If, conversely the ecological crisis triggers a
green technological revolution, the rate of profit can stay equal as
wages rise, so that green capitalism can create its own demand. In
simpler words, if green capitalism is just greenwashing, i.e.
marketing hype unsupported by hard facts, ultimately the ecological
crisis will end up endangering capitalist accumulation leading to the
the common ruin of today's contending social classes: the global élite
and the transnational precariat. If, on the other hand, green
capitalism is the harbinger of a fourth industrial revolution (first:
steam and textiles; second: electricity, steel, chemicals; third:
electronics, networking; fourth: genomics, greenomics), productivity
will rise and this would create a favorable context for victories on
wages and labor conditions, as well as ease political resistance to
income redistribution via progressive taxation (when taxes hit the
rich proportionally more than the poor; under neoliberalism taxation
has instead been regressive). Another way of looking at this is to
consider the fact that the price of a good is equal to the wage rate
divided by productivity (production per hour worked) multiplied by one
plus the rate of profit, the margin that rewards the entrepreneur and
pays interest to the banker. At constant prices, if productivity
increases because of a rise in energy efficiency, either the wage rate
rises or the rate of profit must increase, or a combination of the two
factors§.

Contrary to what Marx predicted, improvements in wages and living
standards have been made possible under capitalism thanks to the
combination of much-sweated technological innovation and hard-fought
social redistribution. Have these improvements come at the cost of
bankrupting the biosphere? It will end up like that if social
resistance to capitalism is not strong enough to decarbonize the
economy. In other words, if climate anarchists lose the incipient
struggle with green capitalists. If movements lose the fight for
climate justice, Earth might become like Venus. From the experience of
the poor and precarious of New Orleans, we know the horrors that lie
in store when climate disaster strikes a class-polarized urban
society. The climate question conceals a social question, because the
precarious stand to lose the most in the biocrisis. On the other hand,
precarious need to be empowered to be effective antagonists to global
financial élites; only if they secure income and leisure, they can
have the freedom to erect the postcapitalist society.
Precarious-to-precarious community solutions to urban habitats,
energy, food production and social housing will have to become
increasingly common as answers to unemployment and environmental
crisis. Whole cities can be redesigned by expanding self-organized
groups of precarious ecohacktivists living from their collective labor
and the sharing of what's produced and exchanged in their social
networks.

If climate justice movements lose the battle that is taking tens of
thousands to Copenhagen in December and thus fail to impose their
collective will onto government and corporate technocrats, then by the
middle of this century most of us will be either drowned or toasted.
What's at stake is neither the survival of capitalism nor
industrialism, but of digital civilization and the promise of the
universal access to information, knowledge and culture that the switch
to postindustrialism has made possible.

Industrialism, informationalism, green capitalism

Green capitalism cannot be simply liquidated as a marketing ploy. It
embodies the faction of the global bourgeoisie that understands the
reality of climate change and of its own declining political
legitimacy in the face of the banking crisis and the consequent end of
neoliberal/monetarist hegemony. Capital does seek now to be submitted
to a light top-down, as opposed to bottom-up, form of regulation,
which, while warranting the survival of megabanks and
megacorporations, tries to accommodate ecological imperatives and
social needs. Fossil capitalism, on the other hand, is purely
reactionary. It has long denied the existence of man-made planetary
heating and it is now lobbying to seize upon the spaces opened by
geopolitical (Iraq, Sudan etc become up for grabs) and ecological (the
North-East and North-West passages are open) disasters. It has spawned
the growth of an oil-military complex that is the biggest threat to
the peace and welfare of humankind. The open defeat of Bushism by
Obama's civil society (young, women, Blacks, Latinos, churches,
unions, community movements) signals the decline of petromilitarism
and the rise of green capitalism. The new US administration is a
definitely a friend of global capitalism and to ensure its viability
is putting forward a set of policies amounting to eco-keynesian
regulation lite, to salvage what’s left of the hegemony of US banks
and corporations over the world economy. Obama’s economic policy is
keynesian because it provides a demand stimulus via deficit spending:
in a deep recession, banks are not lending, firms are not investing,
consumers are not spending, so the state must step in to provide
spending power and capital for investment. But it is eco- in the sense
it provides incentives to augment energy efficiency of the economy and
de-carbonize part of its power production.

Original Fordist keynesianism was incredibly wasteful in energy terms.
Oil was made so cheap and consumer goods so abundant that the
biosphere was trashed in the short space of three decades (1945-1975).
The Soviet bloc, placing an increasingly oblolescent emphasis on heavy
industry and lacking societal counterbalances to communist policies of
industrial might, was proportionally more wasteful, producing a larger
share of nuclear and environmental disasters. In their ideological
competition, both the US and the USSR strove to empower their working
classes as loyal citizens, producers and consumers. Industrialism was
their common structural base. However, it will be wrong to look at the
present ecological crisis as the crisis of "industrial society". In
fact, over the last three decades, informationalism has replaced
industrialism as the dominant system of accumulation. Indeed the
failure of command economies to perform the transition from
industrialism to informationalism, from the electrical engine to the
electronic chip, is viewed by contemporary sociology as the structural
reason behind the implosion of the Soviet Union. Now the inherited
neoliberal form of informational capitalism is morphing into green
capitalism. The evidence for this is mounting: from Silicon Valley
becoming a hotbed for solar to green sectors soon surpassing aerospace
and defense in economic weight, according to a recent study made by
the international bank HSBC.  Industrialism is dependent on oil, coal
and other hydrocarbons in a way that informationalism is not. Steel
needs coal, the Net doesn’t. The problem with green capitalism is that
the scale effect is likely to more than offset any improvements in
energy intensity, so that emissions continue rise. Left to its own
instincts, green capitalism would be ecologically unsustainable. A
steady-state market economy can only come into being through extreme
regulation from below and above.

Yet, economic growth only has a meaning if measured in money terms,
not in physical terms. So, in principle a socially regulated form of
capitalism can be envisaged that still grows in dollar terms (and this
overcomes the economic crisis), but not in entropic terms. A stage of
the economy where immaterial growth becomes the norm, along with the
maximization of collective knowledge and social well-being, rather
than corporate profit or private wealth. An economy where people
mostly exchange immaterial services rather than material goods. In
other words, a world where there's money to be made in the economy,
because informational as well as green jobs are available in large and
increasing numbers. The question of growth must be reconsidered, and
is in fact being reconsidered by economists and politicians in the
light of the crisis: GDP will be soon replaced by alternative
indicator of economic performance and socio-environmental progress.

Today, the décroissance approach is likely to fall on deaf ears,
because it preaches parsimony to a population which is being
precarized by the global recession. Climate justice is definitely a
stronger rallying cry for all the forces resisting capitalist
domination today, one that already resonates from North to South. If
the overdeveloped North must certainly decrease material consumption,
the recovery from the crisis can only occur if there's more effective
demand in euro, dollar, yuan terms in the hands of those with less
money in their pockets and thus likely to spend it when given the
opportunity: the poor, women, precarious and/or immigrant youth.
Social regulation must ensure that this extra money is not spent at
the mall but in ways that are thermodynamically sound: into
sustainable mobility, local agricultural produce, reforestation, and
renewable energy deployment, for example. Social spending must be used
to strengthen the social networks of solidarity within and across
generations and lands. The precarious strata and the informal,
marginal sectors of society are the ones that stand to benefit the
most from fiscal redistribution. Only generalized conflict can
emancipate the precarious and lead to sharp increases in social
spending.

Like the wobblies a century ago, the precarious must organize across
genders and ethnic groups to create their own unions and fight for a
much larger slice of the pie. If the pie's shrinking like Latouche
wants, as people save more and consume less, many more will be made
jobless and the precariat is gonna end up in an even more precarious
condition than under neoliberalism. It's true that capitalism is
addicted to growth, but this is monetary growth, not necessarily an
increase in the amount of "stuff" produced.

The distinction between bounded material growth and unbounded
immaterial growth is useful to conceive a social scenario that is
postcapitalist and progressive. Politically, this would also be a
society where the different aims of anarchosyndicalists (constructing
a postcapitalist egalitarian commonwealth) and anarchogreens (creating
a thermodynamicist society of peers on a biodiverse planet) can be
reconciled. It's a social scenario where the autonomous, pirate, queer
practices of the immaterial precariat are able to defeat the political
offensive of green capitalism and drive the transition toward
postcapitalism, an economy meeting ecological and social targets where
grassroots experimentation is encouraged and regulation is horizontal
and bottom-up, rather than vertical and top-down. To address both the
economic and ecological crisis in my view we would have to push for a
service, relational, commons-based peer-production economy, whose aim
is the growth in knowledge, leisure and culture as opposed to the
growth of goods and material wealth. This would be a society based on
ecological remediation, immaterial accumulation and the maximization
of happiness among its participants, rather than on material opulence
for a minority of people.

Synopsis so far: we have an economic and ecological crisis of
capitalism where class and climate struggles become central. The
social actors of class struggle are new, since capitalism is no longer
industrial, but has become informational. They are the precarious,
those whose rights and talents have been immolated on the altar of
labor flexibility and financial profit. The precarious in the
informational economy must embrace the climate question, because the
solidaristic postcapitalist welfare society they demand can only be
achieved if the ecological struggle fought by the climate anarchists
is won. Since the precariat is the new anticapitalist social subject,
radical ecology shall become its ideology.

Anarchist movements and postcapitalism

The death of communism two decades ago and the birth of the
antiglobalization movement a decade ago have brought anarchism to the
fore as the only plausible anticapitalist ideology, online and
offline. But what's anarchism today? Or more interestingly, who are
the anarchists? I think they mainly come in three types:
anarchogreens, anarchosyndicalists and anarchoautonomists. One could
add the anarchoinsurrectionists, but Julien Coupat in theory and the
Greek rebellion in practice have created a new hybrid category, dubbed
anarcho-autonomie in France, which is highlighted by the insurgent,
antiauthoritarian practices spreading across the dissident/immigrant
youth of Europe and North America. Increasingly, the Italian and
German traditions of autonomia are intertwined with anarchist,
antifascist and antiracist strands to form an anarchoautonomist
synthesis across Europe. A generation totally oblivious of 20th
century ideological disputes does not distinguish between anarchist
and autonomous resistance: on the barricades, all you see is black
hoodies fighting state repression and corporate domination. The
comparative table below portrays the three major anticapitalist
tendencies at work today, and the spectrum of resources for conflict
they offer to the disaffected youth of the metropolises of the planet.
It will be interesting to see how the various discourses of
anticapitalism and radical ecology will mesh into direct action
between December 11 and 16 during the COP15 Climate Summit targeting
fossil capitalism, policed borders, agribusiness, indigenous peoples’
sovereignty, and the very legitimacy and effectiveness of the
conference itself.

Anarchy, Autonomy, Ecology: A Trinity for Anarchists?
        Anarchogreen Anarchosyndicalist Anarchoautonomist

Aim Defend Earth Subvert Economy Smash State

Issue climate change
        social inequality political domination
Ideology radical ecology revolutionary unionism
        autonomous marxism
Direct Action ecotage
        wildcat strike urban riot
Actors ecohacktivists, vegans, animalists, indigenous
peoples precarious/migrant workers, landless, unemployed p2p
multitude, immaterial labor, multiethnic underclass
Movements
 (examples) Earth First!, Climate Camp, KlimaX, MCJ IWA-AIT, SUF, CNT,
euromayday Dissent, Indymedia, No Border, Antifa networks

It's vital for anarchist and libertarian tendencies to look out to the
wider world, while keeping themselves open to the queer and creative
influences coming from contemporary society and popular culture.
Ideological purity and historical fidelity are usually obstacles to
political effectiveness. What's important is not showing our lack of
complicity in the self-destruction of human civilization, but to
prevent it. The fight is not to return to pre-industrial nature,
whatever it was, but foster a postcapitalist natural environment,
where ecosystems, water, trees and bees are the most precious forms of
common wealth.

The solution to the precarious question is not going to be found in
the return to the old speculative, overindebted, overdeveloped,
ecocidal, supremely unequal consumer economy of yore, but in the fight
for a new economic and welfare system built around the environment’s
priorities and the social needs of the precarious sectors of society.
Redistribution can be achieved thanks to massive strike movements and
via capital, corporate and carbon taxation to pay for universal health
and education, basic income for all adults and finance a reduction in
worktime such as the 4-day week, provide everybody with free access to
online knowledge, supply economic incentives for commons-based peer
production and sharing, subsidize green housing and green job creation
for all unemployed wishing to work, socialize banking to fund
renewable energy and sustainable living community projects, promote
urban and labor rights of solidarity striking, self-organization and
self-unionization, and most of all end the scandalous discrimination
and persecution of immigrants and asylum-seekers. The politics of the
common and the struggle around commons -- and especially of the most
precious common of all, the atmosphere -- cannot but start from the
collective defense and expansion of our own urban commons: squats,
social centers, radical associations, alternative theaters,
self-managed parks and gardens etc. Social cooperation needs to find
its own organizational resources and political strategies to prevail
over capitalist enclosures of immaterial assets and privatizations of
social space.

Redistribution of wealth and power toward the precarious, growth of
immaterial knowledge, cultural enrichment of society and massive
expansion of leisure are fundamental social preconditions for the
horizontal eco-social design of a resilient postcapitalist society,
freeing the time to pursue ecohacktive and permacultural activities,
giving the time and money back to precarized people to work for
environmental remediation and think collectively about their own
future, cutting the need for quick consumption and instant
satisfaction. A strongly relational and solidaristic economy would
fulfill many of the needs today obviated by individualized market
transactions. The multigendered and multiethnic precariat can be the
social driver for local low-carbon economies of cooperation, exchange
and mutual aid, food and energy production, just as the immaterial
precariat has so far been the core constituency of the climate camp
movement. After all, in a networked information economy, it's the
anarchists not the capitalists that control the strategic means of
production -- the computing power of connected PCs -- enabling the
distributed elaboration and production of information, culture and
knowledge through networks which is making the age of mass media
obsolete. Immaterial labor puts a new, non-market and non-proprietary
sector at the center of wealth creation. But capitalist domination
strongly resists the encroachment of p2p cooperation on its hitherto
unchallenged prerogatives (directing production and marketing
innovation) and has parliaments and tribunals squarely on its side
striking at the growing commonalism of the precarious class.

To conclude, capitalism destroys environments as it precarizes
peoples. The climate anarchists of the world and the precarious of
europe must come together in Copenhagen to unmask Barroso's and
Obama's carbon trading and government bailouts for the rich. We must
fight for that money to go to social transfers, green jobs and
renewable energy instead, 'cos the Recession don't do discounts and
the Earth won't do bailouts.


Bibliositography

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September-October, 2009
David Balleby Rønbach, "Green jobs are blowing in the wind",
http://www.modkraft.dk/spip.php?article11281, Modkraft Online, August
2009
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of hierarchy, AK Press, 2005
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between Bookchin and Foreman, South End Press, 1991
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of Chicago Press, 2008
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(various editions)
Manuel Castells, Communication Power, Oxford University Press, 2009
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http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2009/05/25/julien-coupat-la-prolongation-de-ma-detention-est-une-petite-vengeance_1197456_3224.html,
Le Monde, May 25, 2009 (he was released soon afterwards)
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Cookbook, Crimethinc., 2004
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Oxford University Press, 2005
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http://www.climate-justice-action.org/news/2009/09/20/705/, September
2009
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to the Third Industrial Revolution", Left Curve 31, March, 2007
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Grande Recessione, Agenzia X, 2009
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http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/22367, August 2009
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to Theory, Pluto, 2007
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iUniverse, 1999
David Goodstein, Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil, Norton, 2004
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Age of Empire, The Penguin Press, 2004
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Next Industrial Revolution, Earthscan, 2005 Thomas F. Homer-Dixon, The
Upside of Down: catastrophe, creativity and the renewal of
civilization, Knopf Canada, 2006
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http://oilwatchsea.org/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=200,
summer 2008
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Thank you ALEX for writing a great visionary political text that takes
the strongest theoretical arguments and addresses them directly to the
people in the streets! I haven't read anything this interesting in a
dog's age, that is, since 1999...

 > From the ashes of early 21st century
 > free-market liberalism, a new form of social and political regulation
 > of the economy will have to emerge if the crisis is to find a
 > democratic solution. In fact, just like in the interwar period,
 > especially in Europe, the danger of authoritarian and xenophobic
 > solutions to the Big Crisis is significant.

Every half-decent historical theory of industrial capitalism shows that
after initial technological booms we run into deep regulation crises
that can only be fixed by changing the institutions of government,
exchange and redistribution. And every half-conscious theorist knows
there is no guarantee that it will be done except for the direst
necessity. "So it falls onto the anarchists, feminists, precarious,
immigrants, on those radical actors that have a stake in subverting the
present financial order, to fight for real climate justice, to bring the
economy back under the control of polities and communities," that's it
and what a responsibility... For those who haven't read the historical
stuff I wanna point their braincells to a Left Curve piece you wrote a
few years ago, which seems like the foundation this new text builds on:

http://www.leftcurve.org/LC31WebPages/Grid&ForkTable.pdf

Compare it to the schema of a smart mainstream theorist like Carlota
Perez, you can see the overlap and also the kind of depth and detail
that Alex is working off:

brianholmes.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/perez-installationdeployment1.jpg

 > The Great Recession, just like the Great Depression three generations
 > ago, is a major demand crisis leading to mass unemployment and
 > underemployment. It won't be solved until the collective fruits of
 > social productivity finally accrue to the employed and unemployed
 > instead of managers and financiers. This requires massive fiscal
 > redistribution from the tiny élites to the precarious multitudes. Free
 > public health and education, basic income and leisure expansion, green
 > jobs and new labor and property laws are the first-aid tools to
 > address the crisis and ferry us toward a postcapitalist society, where
 > corporations and investment banks are dismantled, credit is
 > socialized, copyright is abolished, culture and knowledge are freely
 > shared, the global economy is regionalized, food distribution networks
 > are localized, energy production is decentralized, and political power
 > is federalized, in regional and transnational federations of
 > autonomous cities and liberated lands.

Rhetorical question: Who said our movements aren't proposing anything???

But now I wanna ask some real questions, means, ones where I don't
already have the answer. First, does Green Capitalism even exist? I
definitely see what you call "eco-keynesian regulation lite," but the
environment being protected by all those massive monetary injections is
the environment for speculation, basta. I know if California's
Proposition 7 would've passed last year it would have stoked a green
boom, cause half the state's energy would've had to be clean by 2025 -
but it didn't pass. What do you suppose green capitalism really is? Are
there industries starting, or new molecular economic practices? I'm out
of it, tell us what you know about this...

> if green capitalism is just greenwashing, i.e.
> marketing hype unsupported by hard facts, ultimately the ecological
> crisis will end up endangering capitalist accumulation leading to the
> the common ruin of today's contending social classes: the global élite
> and the transnational precariat. If, on the other hand, green
> capitalism is the harbinger of a fourth industrial revolution (first:
> steam and textiles; second: electricity, steel, chemicals; third:
> electronics, networking; fourth: genomics, greenomics), productivity
> will rise and this would create a favorable context for victories on
> wages and labor conditions, as well as ease political resistance to
> income redistribution

This is the heart of your economic argument, so I wonder what you see as
a possible fourth industrial revolution (or maybe a fifth, 'cause a lot
of people start with water mills and then put railroads and steam in
before in before steel and electricity). Couldn't capitalism already
grow, and grow intelligently and greenly, on the basis of an egalitarian
distribution of informatic production? You know, genetic engineering is
more or less informatics, it's DNA interpreted on the informational
model. I'd say neoliberal aka financial capitalism is a failed
regulation of informational production. Is what we need a green
regulation of informationalism that clears out all the financial waste,
or is informationalism consubstantial with financialization and do we
need something entirely different? Anyway, I'd like to hear more about
the next revolution if you see it in the wings!

> Yet, economic growth only has a meaning if measured in money terms,
> not in physical terms. So, in principle a socially regulated form of
> capitalism can be envisaged that still grows in dollar terms (and this
> overcomes the economic crisis), but not in entropic terms. A stage of
> the economy where immaterial growth becomes the norm, along with the
> maximization of collective knowledge and social well-being, rather
> than corporate profit or private wealth. An economy where people
> mostly exchange immaterial services rather than material goods. In
> other words, a world where there's money to be made in the economy,
> because informational as well as green jobs are available in large and
> increasing numbers.

Is this the anarcho-green solution to the riddle of cognitive
capitalism? So far, all the proposals for a basic income in Italy and
France that I know have excluded the green issue or any other question
of socially constructive activity and have instead been based mostly on
the idea of a solution to precarity and a pathway to free desire. What
you're talking about is a validation in monetary terms of different
kinds of productivity. That would ultimately mean a redefinition of what
productive capital is, since so far it has been defined as
concentrations of alienating machines and hierarchical management. Am I
behind the times on the "reditto di cittadidanza" crowd? Are there
theorists in Italy who are making these ideas explicit?

 > Increasingly, the Italian and
> German traditions of autonomia are intertwined with anarchist,
> antifascist and antiracist strands to form an anarchoautonomist
> synthesis across Europe. A generation totally oblivious of 20th
> century ideological disputes does not distinguish between anarchist
> and autonomous resistance: on the barricades, all you see is black
> hoodies fighting state repression and corporate domination.

Alex, tell me, isn't there a major major major problem of political
articulation right here? You say the aim of the anarcho-autonomist wing
is SMASH THE STATE. But all your argument says TRANSFORM STATE
CAPITALISM. Where's the bridge? We know it in practice: education,
social services and income redistribution, give people what they want
and what they need. But doesn't there have to be some redefinition in
theory of the basic aim, if only to avoid getting chucked in the
terrorist bucket by the fascist fossil capitalist types who are really
still a majority? Or a damn powerful big loud uberminority anyway? I
think the question is serious, because so far, every ultraleftist
upsurge produces a stronger fascistoid reaction and I am not sure those
days are over...

Nobody wants a vanguard and not me either, but don't we have to think
seriously about a class fraction that can mediate between the excluded
precariat and the clueless green capitalist liberals? You know, my big
idea now is that the whole thing stands or falls on the capacity to
really take over the universities, and then all the smash the state
folks think I'm a proto-traitor...

> Redistribution of wealth and power toward the precarious, growth of
> immaterial knowledge, cultural enrichment of society and massive
> expansion of leisure are fundamental social preconditions for the
> horizontal eco-social design of a resilient postcapitalist society,
> freeing the time to pursue ecohacktive and permacultural activities,
> giving the time and money back to precarized people to work for
> environmental remediation and think collectively about their own
> future, cutting the need for quick consumption and instant
> satisfaction.

We are dyin' for it and that ain't no joke!

ecored anarchosolidarities,

Brian


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[Felix Stalder]

Hi Alex,

what a great text. I took me a while to absorb it, since there is so
much in there.

On a theoretical level, I think there are some points deserve to
be spelled out in a bit more detail. Most importantly, it makes
sense to come back to an old Marxist distinction between the "mode
of production" and the "mode of development". Despite a number of
problems with these concepts [1], I think it's vital, as you do, to
distinguish between the "technical relationships of production",
basically the techno-scientific state-of-the- art of doing things,
and the social relationships of production, that is, the social goals
towards which this state-of-the-art is employed. The relationship
between the two is fairly open.

Industrialism and informationalism refer to the mode of development.
Fordism, Soviet-style socialism and more cooperative-oriented
approaches (like Yugoslavia) where industrialism embodied in different
political projects. To me, the most convincing explanation for
the demise of the Soviet-block was its inability to move from
industrialism -- which has reached an internal impasse (threshold of
complexity) at the end of the 1960s -- to a more advanced mode of
development, informationalism.

But also informationalism can be embodied in competing political
projects. So far, we know two. One is informational capitalism,
the other is "commons-based peer production." Now, the type of
competition between these modes of production is very different from
the competition between statism and capitalism, but still, these are
systems of social relationships oriented towards different goals.
Informational capitalism, like all forms of capitalism, is oriented
towards private appropriation of surplus in the hands of the owners
of capital, based on private property and competition between market
participants. Commons-based peer production is oriented towards
use-value and cooperation between participants (competition is on the
level of attention and reputation).

If you take software production, it makes no sense to say anymore that
software production is capitalist. Sure, there are very significant
capitalist actors in it, but they no longer control the field and
the further development of the field is no longer fully-dependent
on them. In other words, there are co-existing modes of production
which together -- in mutual interdependence -- make up the "software
industry". The competition between the two modes of production is
regarding their relative weight within the field as a whole.

I think we have a comparable situation in terms of the greening of the
economy. On the level of the mode of development, there can be only
one direction: forward. We must do things much more intelligently,
and this will require more advanced technologies and more science.
Everything else is a cynical fantasy. Telling the poor to be more
frugal is not an option.

Thus, in terms of the mode of development, I don't think we are
anyway near a next paradigm, and even informational capitalism is
not particularly in crisis. The deep crisis is with the industrial
paradigm and its focus on what now appears as primitive forms of
property (copyright) and primitive ways of energy production (linear
extraction of carbon-rich, finite resources). The greening of the
economy, in my view, is an expansion of informationalism, since, as
Brian pointed out, even genetic engineering basically views DNA as
information system susceptible to the same forms of manipulation like
digital information systems. Meaningless bits -- 4 rather than 2,
though -- to be rearranged into complex networks capable of producing
any meaning. Every cell is now a Turing machine.

The deep question is whether we can establish other modes of          
production which can mobilize the state-of-the-art towards other      
goals. I guess commons-based peer production, or more generally,      
the commons, is the best conceptual and practical basis for such a    
project we have right now. So, the underlying question becomes how    
much "green capitalism" do we need to advance an ecological commons.  
I'm convinced that part of that ecological commons is also a social  
and a informational commons, and the demands of the developing        
countries that green technologies should me made freely available --  
rather than expensively licensed to them -- shows that.              

Green capitalism cannot produce an ecological commons, since
capitalism, geared towards private appropriation, cannot think in
these terms. However, if the commons becomes the dominant framework
on which the existence also capitalist actors depends in an immediate
way, it will seek ways to appropriate surplus that do not destroy the
commons. Put crudely, the GPL forced IBM to advance the free software
commons in the pursuit of private profit. But software is also a
misleading example because of the particular force of the GPL. For the
ecological commons, regulation and supply-side subsidies will make all
the difference.

However, as Alex points out more clearly than I can, as pointed out,
the necessary pressure cannot come from capitalist actors and also not
from the state which is largely captured by these actors. The pressure
must come from these sectors where practice of the commons are already
(or still) established.

A crucial arena in this struggle, as Brian Holmes pointed out, are
current fights of the university and knowledge as a commons. If only
because this seems to be one of the fights that's actually winnable.
Not the least because there is the potential to build large coalitions
around it. On the one hand, universal eduction is a project that is
at the very core of enlightenment, thus it's a deeply felt, positive
value of the enlightened bourgeoisie. On the other hand, it the
contemporary university is a site of precarization. Plus, it's a
genuinely inter-generational concern (students worry about themselves,
parents worry about their kids and remembering the very different
conditions of their own education, at least in EU-land).

The breath of the possible coalition around free universities can
currently be witnessed in Austria, of all places [2]. A wild-cat
occupation of the lecture halls at universities in Vienna has spread
across the country and waves of solidarity are simply amazing,
including unions and pensioner's associations (which are very powerful
in this gerontocratic country). The disappointment with the current
political system is very deep producing a lot of energy. This is
usually harnessed by the extreme right here. Not this time, and not
around this issue. Others will follow.


Felix





[1] The main problem is the general economism of Marxism so that this
differentiation is made only in terms of the economy, and assumes that
the state-of-the-art exist primarily there whereas the social live is
assumed to be more or less free of technology and is not seen as a
source of techno-scientific innovation.


[2] http://unsereuni.at




--- http://felix.openflows.com ----------------------------- out now:
*|Mediale Kunst/Media Arts Zurich.13 Positions.Scheidegger&Spiess2008
*|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006
*|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005


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[Rob van Kranenburg]

Hi Felix,

I really share your optimism, but just not here:

> A crucial arena in this struggle, as Brian Holmes pointed out, are
> current fights of the university and knowledge as a commons.

One Vienna swallow does not a summer in Europe make.

I still get mails from friends at Universities to buy books from their
conferences for 140 euros published by Springer Verlag and when I tell
them I have no intention to pay twice - first through taxes allowing
a system to sponsor people at universities - and a second time to a
German publisher that I do not know personally, they do reply sure
we need to do something about that, but they are clever people and
realize that any real transformation of that system would also be the
end of the universities and their jobs ( and their lives build around
those jobs) as they have no other role to play any more then sheer
powerplay and regulations of knowledge careers through their formats
of ma and phd and prof.

So if "the necessary pressure cannot come from capitalist actors and
also not from the state which is largely captured by these actors." it
can by this very definition also not come from any source that starts
from one of key actors that helped to build the power hegemony: the
university itself,

cheers! Rob




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[Patrice Riemens]

On Sat, Nov 07, 2009 at 03:31:47PM +0100, Rob van Kranenburg wrote:
>
> Hi Felix,
>
> I really share your optimism, but just not here:

<....>


As I wondered what kind of friends Rob had, I got a similar mail from,
yes, a friend (from Germany). In fact another friend of mine actually
works, as editor, for one of these profit maximisers publishers
operating in perfect cahoot with the academic establishment. So you
try to broach the subject of open access/ publishing with these
people, and you get a sympathetic ear from the smart ones (the
minority) and very dark looks from the professionally and militantly
incompetent ones (the vast majority, especially in academia) and you
pretty well know it's hopeless... at least at that level, with these
people and within the existing institutional framework.

That makes me always wonder why people bother about occupying these
empty shells and try to get the scientific establishment(s) changed.
Why not go fishing instead? Would be like the famous German slogan of
the xxxties: "Imagine, there is war, but nobody goes there".

Cheers from the Turkish Tea House, AsiaSource3 F/OSS Camp, IIRR, Silang,
Cavite, Pilipinas  (http://www.asiasource3.net)
patrizio and Diiiinooos!


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[Alex Foti]

Im gonna address Brian's crucial points and then will turn to Felix's.
Sorry for being so late in answering, but Great Recession is biting
and so I lost one of my two jobs and had to scramble for another
source of income... u know the life of precarity that awaits gen x+y+z
now worsened by the slump.

First objection: does green capitalism really exist? Well Soros
and most moneyed venture capitalists (like dorr or perkins&C) are
heavily betting on solar and renewables. On FT a HSBC study says
that environmental sectors could surpass aerospace this year. Plus
Oscar-Nobel Gore, Wash-Oslo Obama, Lord Stern and IPCC are pushing
strongly in that direction and have unimaginable access to global
media. Barroso wants Europe to outcompete the others on this. Hatoyama
wants to cut emissions significantly, and Friedman says green tech
is the new sputnik visavis China. Let's see what happens in Beijing
shortly, although Copenhagen is likely to fail in providing a new
framework for accumulation (new climate treaty), which is what big
corporations want but the US and China (and also India and Brazil) are
unlikely to deliver in December. >

Second point, Brian writes:

> This is the heart of your economic argument (productivity boost or
> not and its redistribution), so I wonder what you see as a possible
> fourth industrial revolution (or maybe a fifth, 'cause a lot of
> people start with water mills and then put railroads and steam
> in before in before steel and electricity). Couldn't capitalism
> already grow, and grow intelligently and greenly, on the basis of an
> egalitarian distribution of informatic production? You know, genetic
> engineering is more or less informatics, it's DNA interpreted on the
> informational model. I'd say neoliberal aka financial capitalism
> is a failed regulation of informational production. Is what we
> need a green regulation of informationalism that clears out all
> the financial waste, or is informationalism consubstantial with
> financialization and do we need something entirely different?
> Anyway, I'd like to hear more about the next revolution if you see
> it in the wings!

Yes! neoliberalism is the failed regulation of informationalism! As an
anarchoautonomist I need something really different, but my prediction
is that green (and non-securitarian) regulation of informationalism is
probably the best we can achieve through our struggles.

In passim about anarchogreens, basic income theory, immaterial growth:
yes, this is my solution to the cognitive and entropic riddles (negri
meets bookchin?;), no theorists of the reddito d'esistenza (they now
like to call it that way) have yet to uncover the link, in fact Andrea
Fumagalli has just proposed we write something togethere on basic
income and climate justice. Given the severity of the recession, basic
income is attracting consensus also on the reformist left. On the
other hand, many anarchogreens just want the fall of industrialism,
in which they include informationalism (in a paradoxical way, on the
NLR Gopal Balakshrinan is also making the argument that 30 years
of informationalism have been largely irrelevant for the basics of
capitalist dynamics).

>> Increasingly, the Italian and German traditions of autonomia are
>> intertwined with anarchist, antifascist and antiracist strands to
>> form an anarchoautonomist synthesis across Europe. A generation
>> totally oblivious of 20th century ideological disputes does not
>> distinguish between anarchist and autonomous resistance: on the
>> barricades, all you see is black hoodies fighting state repression
>> and corporate domination.
>
> Alex, tell me, isn't there a major major major problem of political
> articulation right here? You say the aim of the anarcho-autonomist
> wing is SMASH THE STATE. But all your argument says TRANSFORM
> STATE CAPITALISM. Where's the bridge? We know it in practice:
> education, social services and income redistribution, give people
> what they want and what they need. But doesn't there have to be some
> redefinition in theory of the basic aim, if only to avoid getting
> chucked in the terrorist bucket by the fascist fossil capitalist
> types who are really still a majority? Or a damn powerful big loud
> uberminority anyway? I think the question is serious, because so
> far, every ultraleftist upsurge produces a stronger fascistoid
> reaction and I am not sure those days are over...

Man, Brian, you really got me there! Yes, you could say mine is
an anarcho-reformist piece if such thing existed, and that's why
some anarchogreens found it unpalatabale. If i can find refuge in
non-teleological dialectics (aristotle rather than hegel) i'd say that
only riots and barricades are gonna put the pressure need to bring
about the redistribution of wealth and reorganization of production we
need to survive as informational civilization to the climate crisis. I
don't think that leftist riots today would risk causing a fascistoid
backlash. The securitarian discourse in europe is mostly based on
xenophobia. Economic riots have occurred in 2008-2009 in Europe, East
and West. In countries of the old soviet bloc they've mostly taken a
rightwing form, and a leftwing form in pre-enlargement EU. It'd be
different if precarious and immigrants, anarchoautonomists and young
muslims joined forces in a permanent way, as we saw last year in some
very inspiring episodes. In that case, the shit would hit the fan, and
Europe would be set ablaze. > > Nobody wants a vanguard and not me
either, but don't we have to think > seriously about a class fraction
that can mediate between the excluded > precariat and the clueless
green capitalist liberals? You know, my big idea > now is that the
whole thing stands or falls on the capacity to really take > over the
universities, and then all the smash the state folks think I'm a >
proto-traitor...

I'd say this. These are gloomy times of political radicalization and
of proud identities. With respect to a decade ago, people aged 18-30
are a lot angrier and ready to fight. They won't compromise on any
form of capitalism, but might subscribe to a postcapitalist platform.
Who could be the mediators? On the social front, I'd say new types of
unions (biosyndicates) addressing youth, women, immigrants could be
brokers, because even revoutionary unions have to bargain (should we
import the japanese freeter model in europe?); on the political front,
I'd say that now that the greens are becoming the new socialdemocrats,
it falls onto them to find the new social compromise that reconciles
accumulation with social and ecological needs: Cohn-Bendit will have
to propose more than green liberalism to definitely bury the PS and
the SPD.

ciao fratello and see you all in Copenhagen! lx





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[Alex Foti]

Dear Felix, i realize now you have theorized much more cogently
the relationship between informationalism and green capitalism
than I did. I totally agree Castells' structural interpretation of
fall of USSR is best yet offered. Since I don't have much to add
to your text on these aspects, I will concentrate on what you call
appropriately the competing political projects of informationalism,
one capitalist (murdoch etc) the other commonalist (btw did u see
spat b/w huffington and springer over paid online content? will
send next). Open source peer production is already an economic
reality but not yet a full-fledged political reality, altho pirate
parties clearly are getting most of their votes there. And Hardt and
Negri are portraying immaterial labor as the social constituency
of a cooperative revolutionary autonomous multitude (Commonwealth
is a great book, in my opinion) which mobilizes around a radical
politics of the common(s) to overthrow existing capitalism. Their
take is: if the poor, precarious, immigrants don't build the new
institutions of the common, they won't defeat the republic of property
to replace it with a wobbly commonwealth (may the authors forgive this
brutal synopsis). Their emphasis is on the foucaultian production of
alternative, radical subjectivity.

But a competing political project needs to also be grounded in
ideological and geopolitical realities and no p2p revolutionary
army or emerging power is posing as alternative to nato-defended
imf-governed informational capitalism. Maybe a more nuanced analysis
would counterpose authoritarian informational oligarchies like China,
Russia, Italy to liberal republics of copyright (US, UK). Definitely
there's internal opposition within the EU to copyright enforcement,
but it's not yet portraying a systemic alternative.

Maybe I'm too traditional on this, but to me it seems that in Europe
the major cleavage is not on property rights but on identity: what's
Europe? when did it start and where does it end? It's Western
and Christian, i.e. monoethnic, the Right says. Multiethnic and
Solidaristic, movements are saying (since the Left is basically dead
in the Old Continent). The other cleavage, which the EU has in common
with the US, is the absurdity of trillions to the bankers that caused
the crisis while people get fired by the millions. There's likely to
be a social explosion over this: will it go left, will it go right?

solidarity to the striking universities of Austria!

love and climate justice, lx






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