This letter was collaboratively written with dozens of aligned groups. As the weeks of action called by Extinction Rebellion were coming to an end, our groups came together to reflect on the narrative, strategies, tactics and demands of a reinvigorated climate movement in the UK. In this letter we articulate a foundational set of principles and demands that are rooted in justice and which we feel are crucial for the whole movement to consider as we continue constructing a response to the ‘climate emergency’.

Dear Extinction Rebellion,

The emergence of a mass movement like Extinction Rebellion (XR) is an encouraging sign that we have reached a moment of opportunity in which there is both a collective consciousness of the immense danger ahead of us and a collective will to fight it. A critical mass agrees with the open letter launching XR when it states “If we continue on our current path, the future for our species is bleak.”

At the same time, in order to construct a different future, or even to imagine it, we have to understand what this “path” is, and how we arrived at the world as we know it now. “The Truth” of the ecological crisis is that we did not get here by a sequence of small missteps, but were thrust here by powerful forces that drove the distribution of resources of the entire planet and the structure of our societies. The economic structures that dominate us were brought about by colonial projects whose sole purpose is the pursuit of domination and profit. For centuries, racism, sexism and classism have been necessary for this system to be upheld, and have shaped the conditions we find ourselves in.

Another truth is that for many, the bleakness is not something of “the future”. For those of us who are indigenous, working class, black, brown, queer, trans or disabled, the experience of structural violence became part of our birthright. Greta Thunberg calls world leaders to act by reminding them that “Our house is on fire”. For many of us, the house has been on fire for a long time: whenever the tide of ecological violence rises, our communities, especially in the Global South are always first hit. We are the first to face poor air quality, hunger, public health crises, drought, floods and displacement.

XR says that “The science is clear: It is understood we are facing an unprecedented global emergency. We are in a life or death situation of our own making. We must act now.”  You may not realize that when you focus on the science you often look past the fire and us – you look past our histories of struggle, dignity, victory and resilience. And you look past the vast intergenerational knowledge of unity with nature that our peoples have. Indigenous communities remind us that we are not separate from nature, and that protecting the environment is also protecting ourselves. In order to survive, communities in the Global South continue to lead the visioning and building of new worlds free of the violence of capitalism. We must both centre those experiences and recognise those knowledges here.

Our communities have been on fire for a long time and these flames are fanned by our exclusion and silencing. Without incorporating our experiences, any response to this disaster will fail to change the complex ways in which social, economic and political systems shape our lives – offering some an easy pass in life and making others pay the cost. In order to envision a future in which we will all be liberated from the root causes of the climate crisis – capitalism, extractivism, racism, sexism, classism, ableism and other systems of oppression –  the climate movement must reflect the complex realities of everyone’s lives in their narrative.

And this complexity needs to be reflected in the strategies too. Many of us live with the risk of arrest and criminalization. We have to carefully weigh the costs that can be inflicted on us and our communities by a state that is driven to target those who are racialised ahead of those who are white. The strategy of XR, with the primary tactic of being arrested, is a valid one – but it needs to be underlined by an ongoing analysis of privilege as well as the reality of police and state violence. XR participants should be able to use their privilege to risk arrest, whilst at the same time highlighting the racialised nature of policing. Though some of this analysis has started to happen, until it becomes central to XR’s organising it is not sufficient. To address climate change and its roots in inequity and domination, a diversity and plurality of tactics and communities will be needed to co-create the transformative change necessary.

We commend the energy and enthusiasm XR has brought to the environmental movement, and it brings us hope to see so many people willing to take action. But as we have outlined here, we feel there are key aspects of their approach that need to evolve. This letter calls on XR to do more in the spirit of their principles which say they “are working to build a movement that is participatory, decentralised, and inclusive”. We know that XR has already organised various listening exercises, and acknowledged some of the shortcomings in their approach, so we trust XR and its members will welcome our contribution.

As XR draws this period of actions to a close, we hope our letter presents some useful reflections for what can come next. The list of demands that we present below are not meant to be exhaustive, but to offer a starting point that supports the conversations that are urgently needed.

Wretched of the Earth, together with many other groups, hold the following demands as crucial for a climate justice rebellion:

• Implement a transition, with justice at its core, to reduce UK carbon emissions to zero by 2030 as part of its fair share to keep warming below 1.5°C; this includes halting all fracking projects, free transport solutions and decent housing, regulating and democratising corporations, and restoring ecosystems.
• Pass a Global Green New Deal to ensure finance and technology for the Global South through international cooperation. Climate justice must include reparations and redistribution; a greener economy in Britain will achieve very little if the government continues to hinder vulnerable countries from doing the same through crippling debt, unfair trade deals, and the export of its own deathly extractive industries. This Green New Deal would also include an end to the arms trade. Wars have been created to serve the interests of corporations – the largest arms deals have delivered oil; whilst the world’s largest militaries are the biggest users of petrol.
• Hold transnational corporations accountable by creating a system that regulates them and stops them from practicing global destruction. This would include getting rid of many existing trade and investment agreements that enshrine the will of these transnational corporations.
• Take the planet off the stock market by restructuring the financial sector to make it transparent, democratised, and sustainable while discentivising investment in extractive industries and subsidising renewable energy programmes, ecological justice and regeneration programmes.
• End the hostile environment of walls and fences, detention centers and prisons that are used against racialised, migrant, and refugee communities. Instead, the UK should acknowledge it’s historic and current responsibilities for driving the displacement of peoples and communities and honour its obligation to them.
• Guarantee flourishing communities both in the global north and the global south in which everyone has the right to free education, an adequate income whether in or out of work, universal healthcare including support for mental wellbeing, affordable transportation, affordable healthy food, dignified employment and housing, meaningful political participation, a transformative justice system, gender and sexuality freedoms, and, for disabled and older people, to live independently in the community.

The fight for climate justice is the fight of our lives, and we need to do it right. We share this reflection from a place of love and solidarity, by groups and networks working with frontline communities, united in the spirit of building a climate justice movement that does not make the poorest in the rich countries pay the price for tackling the climate crisis, and refuses to sacrifice the people of the global South to protect the citizens of the global North. It is crucial that we remain accountable to our communities, and all those who don’t have access to the centres of power. Without this accountability, the call for climate justice is empty.

The Wretched of the Earth

• Argentina Solidarity Campaign
• Black Lives Matter UK
• BP or not BP
• Bolivian Platform on Climate Change
• Bristol Rising Tide
• Campaign Against the Arms Trade CAAT
• Coal Action Network
• Concrete Action
• Decolonising Environmentalism
• Decolonising our minds
• Disabled People Against the Cuts
• Earth in Brackets
• Edge Fund
• End Deportations
• Ende Gelände
• GAIA – Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives
• Global Forest Coalition
• Green Anticapitalist Front
• Gentle Radical
• Grow Heathrow/transition Heathrow
• Hambach Forest occupation
• Healing Justice London
• Labour Against Racism and Fascism
• Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants
• London campaign against police and state violence
• London Feminist Antifa
• London Latinxs
• Marikana Solidarity Campaign
• Mental Health Resistance Network
• Migrants Connections festival
• Migrants Rights Network
• Movimiento Jaguar Despierto
• Ni Una Menos UK
• Ota Benga Alliance for Peace
• Our Future Now
• People’s Climate Network
• Peoples’ Advocacy Foundation for Justice and
• Race on the Agenda (ROTA)
• Redress, South Africa
• Reclaim the Power
• Science for the People
• Platform
• The Democracy Centre
• The Leap
• Third World Network
• Tripod: Training for Creative Social Action
• War on Want

Wretched of The Earth is a grassroots collective for Indigenous, black, brown and diaspora groups and individuals demanding climate justice and acting in solidarity with our communities, both here in the UK and in Global South. Join our mailing list by completing this registration form.

Image of Wretched of the Earth bloc with “Still fighting CO2lonialism Your climate profits kill” banner.

Originally published on the Red Pepper website, 3rd May 2019: https://www.redpepper.org.uk/an-open-letter-to-extinction-rebellion/

The post An open letter to Extinction Rebellion appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Contextual Citation

The call for a Reparation Ecology by Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel:

“Weighing the injustices of centuries of exploitation can resacralize human relations within the web of life. Redistributing care, land and work so that everyone has a chance to contribute to the improvement of their lives and to that of the ecology around them can undo the violence of abstraction that capitalism makes us perform every day. We term this vision “reparation ecology” and offer it as a way to see history as well as the future, a practice and a commitment to equality and reimagined relations for humans in the web of life.” (https://roarmag.org/magazine/moore-patel-seven-cheap-things-capitalocene/)

Description

1. From the publisher:

“Nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives: these are the seven things that have made our world and will shape its future. In making these things cheap, modern commerce has transformed, governed, and devastated Earth. In A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore present a new approach to analyzing today’s planetary emergencies. Bringing the latest ecological research together with histories of colonialism, indigenous struggles, slave revolts, and other rebellions and uprisings, Patel and Moore demonstrate that throughout history, crises have always prompted fresh strategies to make the world cheap and safe for capitalism. At a time of crisis in all seven cheap things, innovative and systemic thinking is urgently required. This book proposes a radical new way of understanding—and reclaiming—the planet in the turbulent twenty-first century.” (https://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520293137)

2. From the intro by the authors, Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel:

“In our new book … we show how the modern world has been made through seven cheap things: nature, money, work, care, food, energy and lives. Every word in that sentence is difficult. Cheap is the opposite of a bargain — cheapening is a set of strategies to control a wider web of life that includes humans. “Things” become things through armies and clerics and accountants and print. Most centrally, humans and nature don’t exist as giant seventeenth-century billiard balls crashing into each other. The pulse of life-making is messy, contentious and mutually sustaining. Our book introduces a way to think about the complex relationships between humans and the web of life that helps make sense of the world we’re in and suggests what it might become.

As a teaser, let’s return to those chicken bones in the geological record, a capitalist trace of the relation between humans and the world’s most common bird, Gallus gallus domesticus. The chickens we eat today are very different from those consumed a century ago. Today’s birds are the result of intensive post-World War II efforts drawing on genetic material sourced freely from Asian jungles, which humans decided to recombine to produce the most profitable fowl. That bird can barely walk, reaches maturity in weeks, has an oversize breast, and is reared and slaughtered in geologically significant quantities (more than 60 billion birds a year). Think of this relationship as a sign of Cheap Nature.

Already the most popular meat in the United States, chicken is projected to be the planet’s most popular flesh for human consumption by 2020. That will require a great deal of labor. Poultry workers are paid very little: in the United States, two cents for every dollar spent on a fast-food chicken goes to workers, and some chicken operators use prison labor, paid twenty-five cents per hour. Think of this as Cheap Work.

In the US poultry industry, 86 percent of workers who cut wings are in pain because of the repetitive hacking and twisting on the line. Some employers mock their workers for reporting injury, and the denial of injury claims is common. The result for workers is a 15 percent decline in income for the ten years after injury. While recovering, workers will depend on their families and support networks, a factor outside the circuits of production but central to their continued participation in the workforce. Think of this as Cheap Care.

The food produced by this industry ends up keeping bellies full and discontent down through low prices at the checkout and drive-through. That’s a strategy of Cheap Food.

Chickens themselves are relatively minor contributors to climate change — they have only one stomach each and don’t burp out methane like cows do — but they’re bred in large lots that use a great deal of fuel to keep warm. This is the biggest contributor to the US poultry industry’s carbon footprint. You can’t have low-cost chicken without abundant propane: Cheap Energy.

There is some risk in the commercial sale of these processed birds, but through franchising and subsidies, everything from easy financial and physical access to the land on which the soy feed for chickens is grown — mainly in China, Brazil and the United States — to small business loans, that risk is mitigated through public expense for private profit. This is one aspect of Cheap Money.

Finally, persistent and frequent acts of chauvinism against categories of human life — such as women, the colonized, the poor, people of color and immigrants — have made each of these six cheap things possible. Fixing this ecology in place requires a final element — the rule of Cheap Lives.” (https://roarmag.org/magazine/moore-patel-seven-cheap-things-capitalocene/)

Excerpt

(from the introduction)

How climate change spurred the end of feudalism

Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel: “Civilizations don’t collapse because humans reproduce too fast and starve, as Robert Malthus warned in his Essay on the Principles of Population. Since 1970, the number of malnourished people has remained above 800 million, yet few talk of the end of civilization. Instead, great historical transitions occur because “business as usual” no longer works. The powerful have a way of sticking to time-honored strategies even when the reality is radically changing. So it was with feudal Europe. The Black Death was not simply a demographic catastrophe. It also tilted the balance of forces in European society.

Feudalism depended on a growing population, not only to produce food but also to reproduce lordly power. The aristocracy wanted a relatively high peasant population, to maintain its bargaining position: many peasants competing for land was better than many lords competing for peasants. But feudalism was a system born of an earlier climate. Historians call this the Medieval Warm Period — it was so balmy that vineyards reached Norway. That changed at the dawn of the fourteenth century. Climate may not be destiny, but if there is a historical lesson from climate history, it’s that ruling classes don’t survive climate transitions. Feudalism’s class-enforced monocultures crumbled in the face of the Little Ice Age: famine and disease quickly followed.

As a result, with the onset of the Black Death, webs of commerce and exchange didn’t just transmit disease — they became vectors of mass insurrection. Almost overnight, peasant revolts ceased being local affairs and became large-scale threats to the feudal order. After 1347 these uprisings were synchronized — they were system-wide responses to an epochal crisis, a fundamental breakdown in feudalism’s logic of power, production and nature.

The Black Death precipitated an unbearable strain on a system already stretched to the breaking point. Europe after the plague was a place of unrelenting class war, from the Baltics to Iberia, London to Florence. Peasant demands for tax relief and the restoration of customary rights were calls that feudalism’s rulers could not tolerate. If Europe’s crowns, banks and aristocracies could not suffer such demands, neither could they restore the status quo ante, despite their best efforts. Repressive legislation to keep labor cheap, through wage controls or outright re-enserfment, came in reaction to the Black Death. Among the earliest was England’s Ordinance and Statute of Labourers, enacted in the teeth of the plague’s first onslaught (1349–51). The equivalent today would be to respond to an Ebola epidemic by making unionization harder.

The labor effects of climate change were abundantly clear to Europe’s aristocrats, who exhausted themselves trying to keep business very much as usual. They failed almost entirely. Nowhere in western or central Europe was serfdom reestablished. Wages and living standards for peasants and urban workers improved substantially, enough to compensate for a decline in the overall size of the economy. Although this was a boon for most people, Europe’s 1 percent found their share of the economic surplus contracting. The old order was broken and could not be fixed.

Capitalism emerged from this broken state of affairs. Ruling classes tried not just to restore the surplus but to expand it. That was easier said than done, however. East Asia was wealthier, so although its rulers also experienced socio-ecological tribulations, they found ways to accommodate upheaval, deforestation and resource shortages in their own tributary terms. One solution that reinvented humans’ relation to the web of life was stumbled upon by the Iberian aristocracy — in Portugal and Castile above all. By the end of the fifteenth century, these kingdoms and their societies had made war through the Reconquista, the centuries-long conflict with Muslim powers on the peninsula, and were so deeply dependent on Italian financiers to fund their military campaigns that Portugal and Castile had in turn been remade by war and debt.

The mix of war debt and the promise of wealth through conquest spurred the earliest invasions of the Atlantic. The solution to war debt was more war, with the payoff being colonial profit on new, great frontiers. The modern world emerged from systematic attempts to fix crises at this frontier. What followed was an epochal transition: one that reinvented the surplus around a cocktail of banking, slaving, and killing.” (https://roarmag.org/magazine/moore-patel-seven-cheap-things-capitalocene/)

On the perspective of World-Ecology

Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel: “Our view of capitalism is part of a perspective that we call world-ecology. World-ecology has emerged in recent years as a way to think through human history in the web of life. Rather than begin with the separation of humans from the web of life, we ask questions about how humans — and human arrangements of power and violence, work and inequality — fit within nature. Capitalism is not just part of an ecology but is an ecology — a set of relationships integrating power, capital and nature. So when we write — and hyphenate — world-ecology, we draw on older traditions of “world-systems” to say that capitalism creates an ecology that expands over the planet through its frontiers, driven by forces of endless accumulation.

To say world-ecology is not, therefore, to invoke the “ecology of the world” but to suggest an analysis that shows how relations of power, production and reproduction work through the web of life. The idea of world-ecology allows us to see how the modern world’s violent and exploitative relationships are rooted in five centuries of capitalism and also how these unequal arrangements — even those that appear timeless and necessary today — are contingent and in the midst of unprecedented crisis. World-ecology, then, offers something more than a different view of capitalism, nature and possible futures. It offers a way of seeing how humans make environments and environments make humans through the long sweep of modern history.

This opens space for us to reconsider how the ways that we have been schooled to think of change — ecological, economic, and all the rest — are themselves implicated in today’s crises. That space is crucial if we are to understand the relationship between naming and acting on the world. Movements for social justice have long insisted on “naming the system” because the relationships among thought, language and emancipation are intimate and fundamental to power. World-ecology allows us to see how concepts we take for granted — like Nature and Society — are problems not just because they obscure actual life and history but because they emerged out of the violence of colonial and capitalist practice.

Modern concepts of Nature and Society were born in Europe in the sixteenth century. These master concepts were not only formed in close relation to the dispossession of peasants in the colonies and in Europe but also themselves used as instruments of dispossession and genocide. The Nature/Society split was fundamental to a new, modern cosmology in which space was flat, time was linear and nature was external. That we are usually unaware of this bloody history — one that includes the early-modern expulsions of most women, Indigenous Peoples and Africans from humanity — is testimony to modernity’s extraordinary capacity to make us forget.

World-ecology therefore commits not only to rethinking but to remembering. Too often we attribute capitalism’s devastation of life and environments to economic rapaciousness alone, when much of capitalism cannot be reduced to economics. Contrary to neoliberal claptrap, businesses and markets are ineffective at doing most of what makes capitalism run. Cultures, states and scientific complexes must work to keep humans obedient to norms of gender, race and class. New resource geographies need to be mapped and secured, mounting debts repaid, coin defended. World-ecology offers a way to recognize this, to remember — and see anew — the lives and labors of humans and other natures in the web of life.” (https://roarmag.org/magazine/moore-patel-seven-cheap-things-capitalocene/)

The post Book of the Day: History of the World in Seven Cheap Things appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In this series of podcasts, we explore pathways for climate justice in the Anthropocene – a geological epoch shaped by humans. Should we become stewards of our planet or live in harmony with nature to achieve a good life for all? We take our listeners on a journey to find out how we can reach the Paris goals. Through the lens of activists, experts, and scientists around the world, we reflect on this exciting challenge and explore paths that might lead us into a better future.

The pictures of our planet from a distance are beautiful and insightful. They show us a fragile marble in space that is ours to protect. But these pictures have also brought us another belief: that what happens on the ground is too small to count. We think that only global solutions can solve our global problems. But at the most local level, communities are already developing solutions. And this is why it’s time to zoom in again – back down to Earth.

In this podcast series, we’ve looked at different strategies to address climate change. We’ve discussed the risky ideas of geo-engineering and heard about climate cases in courtrooms around the world. We also considered the failures of carbon markets and talked about the links between climate change and agriculture.

In this final episode, we will take a look at the broader transformations that are necessary. Climate change is such a unique challenge that each and every sector of our society will have to change. At the same time, it is just one of the many urgent crises we face today. To get to the root of all of them, we need to consider a fundamental shift in thinking about our economies and lifestyles.

Do we need a master plan to get there? Maybe not. Because right now, people are already developing local solutions. They are experimenting with new paths toward just and sustainable lifestyles across the world. It’s a diverse set of approaches, but they share a common vision: The idea, that a good life for all is possible.

Do you know these moments when you reflect on your life and it feels like everything is accelerating?  We feel pushed to work more, to work harder and to always compete. Not because we want to move forward, but just because we want to keep up with everyone else.

This treadmill is part of a larger paradigm that we live in. It’s the logic of growth, says Barbara Muraca. Barbara lives in the United States and teaches Environmental and Social Philosophy at Oregon State University:

Modern, capitalistic societies are completely built around the idea of increasing economic growth. The retirement system in many countries, the taxation system, employment etc. So, if modern industrialized societies stop growing, they collapse. We call one year with reduced growth recession or crisis!

When you read the news, it may seem as if we’d be lost without an ever-growing economy. Growth is considered essential for a stable and booming society, and it comes with huge expectations. It’s supposed to guarantee employment, ensure peace, and provide wealth for everyone. We treat growth as the promise of a good life for all. But unfortunately, growth hasn’t delivered on its promise.

Now, the problem is that we have reached a point at which growth has turned from a means to improve quality of life to a goal of its own. Now, we can imagine what it means if we apply that to our own body. What would it mean if we grew every year 3 percent more than the year before? That would be completely crazy, and the balance of our body would indeed collapse, says Barbara Muraca

What seems crazy for our bodies is an accepted paradigm in economics: that we can grow and grow forever. In the process, our societies have become more and more divided. A few people get very rich, but the vast majority struggles. Growth doesn’t mean employment for everyone. And the financial market has stumbled into crisis. So why do so many of us still believe in the logic of growth?

I like the idea of mental infrastructures. You can imagine the highways that are built in our mind that we are used to take and stop seeing the side-roads and possible alternative paths, because we are used to take these highways, says Barbara Muraca

We want both: More energy, and clean energy. Can the two go together without doing harm to nature and other people? Technology is the focus of the so-called Green Economy, but it doesn’t come without side-effects. And while we green our energy systems, we are also consuming more and more resources. So if we really want to reduce our footprint, we need to change our lifestyles and habits. Like eating less meat for example, since breeding livestock produces high carbon emissions.

So, the good news is that especially in countries, like Europe and the US, meat consumption has been significantly reduced in the last years. The bad news however, is that, precisely because of the logic of growth and profit, the export of meat from Europe and the US has increased in the last years as well. And the OECD countries have really been celebrating the creation of new markets for meat in China and India and even issued dietary recommendation to increase meat consumption in these countries, says Barbara Muraca

This is just one example of how the logic of growth reproduces itself  against our best intentions. We are unable to simply stop growing no matter how much we try to size down. Sowe must change the basic structure of our societies in order to make them less dependent on economic growth.

Did you know that many rich countries have already hit their limits of growth? Their economies don’t grow as much as they used to anymore. This is the case in Germany, Canada or the U.S. In such countries economies grow only slowly by just one or two percent each year.

At the same time, many developing countries are growing quickly, like China and the Senegal. Their growth can be as high as five or six percent a year. The rate is much slower than it used to be but still high compared to some of the old industrialized countries. A big part of this boom happens in Asia.

In India’s, for example, the economy is expected to grow by up to eight percent each year. And this boom comes with huge changes. We reached out to AshEEsh Ko(h)thar(EE) to understand how such a fast-growing world looks like. Ashish is based in Pune in the West of India:

It’s a very large city, well small by Indian standards, about 4 million people.

Ashish is an environmental activist and co-author of the book “Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India”. The miraculous growth of his country has come at a huge cost, he explained to us:

Well, in India, as I guess across the world, we have a model of development which essentially focuses on economic growth and industrialization and commercialization. You know, a uni-directional approach which says that we have to move from agriculture and pastoralism to industrialization to services to digital economy etc. etc. And what this has meant for very, very large sections of India’s population is dispossession, because this kind of an economy needs the land and the forest and the waters to be taken away from those who traditionally depended on them. It holds to be primitive and outmoded their own knowledge systems, very sophisticated ways by which people have dealt with or have lived within nature. All of that is considered to be out-modeled and is supposed to be discarded.

The city of Pune has become one of India’s tech centers. International companies working in information technology, agribusiness and renewable energy have set up camp in the region. The car industry here accounts for a third of the Indian market. More and more Indians are buying cars. And they are finding jobs in the tech sector – and not just in Pune:

In all the schools if you look at the kind of teaching that happens, people are taught that doing farming, and pastoralism or fisheries or forestry work is no longer cool. It’s not something that one needs, should be doing in the 21. Century, the 21. Century should be about computers, it should be about being in industries, it should be about learning sophisticated technologies, being savvy with gadgets and so on. So, what we’re seeing is a kind of dispriviledging and displacement of nature-based livelihoods, which in India, most of the population actually still is living that.

Half of India’s people still work on farms, in forestry or in fishing. But their numbers are decreasing. People are moving away from the rural areas and into the cities. They give up their traditional livelihoods, hoping to succeed in the new economy.

And from those livelihoods where people are being offered are what I call deadlihoods. Because essentially their mass jobs there, there is no dignity, there is no meaningfulness with this, people are just part of a much larger chain of production. They are subject to the whims and fancies of a small number of owners, whether it’s government or it’s capitalist. And even in the so-called modern sector, things like computers and all, most of the jobs that people have are extremely deadening, there is no liveliness and then there’s no passion. And so, really, the replacement is by jobs with actually what I call deadlihoods, says Ashish Kothari.

Oftentimes, this means repeating the same action in a factory over and over again for a tiny payout. As you heard, AshEEsh calls these jobs ‘deadlihoods’. They separate people from nature and from the products they make, and expose them to tough and toxic working conditions that can be extremely dangerous. Here, global companies can produce at a lower cost, because the rules for the protection of workers and the environment are still less stringent. In many cases, the products are then shipped abroad.

So, there is also then a significant impact on the environment. In India, we already know that we are on a very steep, unsustainable path, using twice the amount of natural resources that can be regenerated. We’re already seeing severe, very severe shortages of water, problems of deforestation, flooding, droughts. And, of course now, combined with all that, the impacts of climate change, says Ashish Kothari.

India is both fueling climate change and suffering from its consequences. More and more cars are crowding the streets, and coal-fired power plants pollute the air. To AshEEsh, the current system perpetuates inequalities, to the benefit of a small elite. Simply greening the economy, he says, won’t solve the larger problem.

If one wants to change the situation we’re in, we have to tackle the system at its roots. We have to tackle the system in terms of the political concentrations of power in the state, the economic concentrations of power in capitalism, the gender concentrations of power and patriarchy. And depending on where we are in the world, in India for instance, castism, which is very old. These fundamental actors of society have to be challenged and changed, if we’re really want to try and solve this problem, says Ashish Kothari.

You’ve heard it from our guests in the United States and India: Ashish and Barbara are convinced that we need a new kind of thinking and a new way of doing. They say we need to work on creating a fundamentally different world. This might sound utopian. But there are already projects emerging that try to do just that. Take the concept of Degrowth:

The movement on Degrowth in Europe, is a very, very important one, because we have to really challenge and say that not only have we gone too far and too much, too big. Actually, we have to degrow, we have to scale down considerably our use of materials and energy. Especially if we are genuine about other parts of the world that have got left behind. Being able to at least meet their basic needs. I’m not saying they should be able to develop in the same pattern, but at least be able to do away with the kind of deprivation that there’s an unequal form of development has caused.

The Degrowth idea comes in many shapes. Initially, the movement formed in France, under the name décroissance. It was taken up in Italy and Spain, where Degrowth is called Descrescita, or Decrecimiento. And in Germany, economists are working on so-called post-growth societies. Barbara is among those who support this Degrowth movement.

I do not think that growth is in the long term possible at this rate and I think that if we don’t move on with a radical transformation, we will end up in recurrent crisis, even worse than the crisis of 2008. So, for me, Degrowth is not just a utopia, it’s a necessary path to transform society, says Barbara Muraca.

But Degrowth seems a rather vague term. So what would this transformation actually look like? The people working on Degrowth won’t be able to send you a copy of their master plan. They don’t claim that they even know how it’s going to work. Instead, they are all about leaving the beaten path, and venture into uncharted territory.

And for this we need spaces in which we can experience and experiment what the difference might be like.) We have to experience what it means to live differently. Not only to think about that, but to make the experience in our bodies, in our minds, and in our desires. And I don’t think that this is not just an abstract idea or wishful thinking. Around us, there are so many different projects, social experiments and initiatives, that are already embodying this perspective. And they are already creating spaces where we can experiment alternative futures and start working on them. And I think they are contagious and powerful, says Barbara Muraca.

One space in which such alternative worlds are being explored is the Transition Town movement. Barbara says this is a great example of how we could develop new solutions.

You have small towns or neighborhoods, where people get together and the leading idea is to develop a plan to make their community no longer dependent on fossil fuels. But it is more than that. People build learning networks and start from their potentials and the skills that are there at the local level and they start to re-imagine the place where they live. They really rethink the economy, they reimagine work, they re-skill in order to develop the competences that are necessary to implement a different way of living, but they are also very concerned about social justice for example, says Barbara Muraca.

One of the most well-known Transition Towns is Bristol in the United Kingdom. The people there have developed creative ideas like the Bristol Pound. It’s a local currency, and it cannot be accumulated like normal money in the bank. Instead of generating profit, the Bristol Pound sustains the local economy. There’s a food network and there’s a community-owned farm. In these projects, what’s also being tested are new models of ownership:

It’s not just about sharing the use of tools, but about really rethinking the way we produce stuff. If we can generate production which is independent from the logic of profit, we don’t have to keep going with the idea of mass production and mass consumption. We can produce things that are modular, that can be highly recycled by local communities, that can tackle and address the needs of communities, and that are completely independent from the necessity of generate, recreate and accumulate increasing profit – which is what is happening now with the standard model of production.

If we produce locally, share our stuff and repair things when they are broken, we can decrease our footprint on the planet. And we can defy the logic of growth, by taking back control over our local resources. An interesting example of this comes from Mendha Lekha in India.

And this village in the last 40 years has kind of declared that in its village and for all the ecosystems around it, the…nobody else will be taking decisions but the village assembly itself. So their slogan is that while we elect the government in New Delhi and Mumbai, in our village, we are the government. (Now, through all of this they have upturned 200 years of colonial and forced colonial history, where the forests have been taken control off by the state.) They’ve taken control back to themselves and they now manage the entire forest, 2000 hectares around them, and they manage it in such a way that it is sustainable, that the conservation is taking place, they also recently agreed communized all the agricultural land, which means there’s no private land on the village anymore. And this also helps them to control cropping patterns, to make sure what lands are not being sold off for mining or industries, and so on, says Ashish Kothari.

Ashish calls it a form of direct and radical democracy. Around the world, communities have reclaimed control over important resources, such as water. In another case, in the Western Indian district of Kachchh (Kutch), local people are taking care of their water in a new way. It’s an area where water is extremely scarce. So one hundred villages have banded to collect and use rainwater in a local, equitable and decentralised way. They manage it through local committees. In this way, the system provides enough water for the basic needs of every village:

This becomes very important because when one is talking about  the mainstream model of water, creating a big dam somewhere and then transporting that water somewhere else,  we now know that large reservoirs can also be serious sources of emissions.

When a valley is flooded to build a dam, it buries the soil and vegetation. The plants start rotting and emit methane. This powerful greenhouse gas can warm the planet. The second issue is that big dams often change the agricultural practices around it. Farmers shift from dryland farming to irrigated farming and start using chemical fertilizers, says Ashish. So the people of Kutch are saving planet-warming emissions, as well as their traditional farming practice.

When they are able to do local water harvesting, they continue with mostly their dry land farming agriculture, which necessarily is more diverse, it’s more localized, has less emissions, it’s mostly organic – and because it is diverse it is also more adaptable and able to deal with aspects of climate change, says Ashish Kothari.

Our addiction to growth has reached its limits. It’s threatening our environment as well as human dignity. Can we imagine a world beyond growth? Let’s look at our bodies when we get older.

After a certain threshold, our bodies stop growing physically, but do not stop being creative and learning and developing in a different way. And for the economy it’s similar, says Barbara Muraca.

Degrowth activists like Barbara are convinced that another world is possible. But she also says we need more than small reforms and green technologies. We need a fundamental change. What could this look like? There are many people already out and experimenting. Barbara says that the key is to build alliances among them:

So, stopping coal extraction in Germany for example, per se is not enough, because it leads to coal being imported now from Colombia. And in Colombia, pristine forests are destroyed and indigenous people are evicted for the coal mines. So, we to have to combine the blockage of coal mining in Germany with the things that the Transition Town people are advocating which is transforming the economy and society to make it less dependent on fossil fuels at the same time.

Modern culture tells us that we count mainly as individuals. We are divided into producers and consumers. This makes us easy to control. But if we reconnect as collectives, we can realize our power to shape the world:

If all goes well I think the world is moving towards what I call the radical ecological democracy, where the basic unit of decision-making is the collective, in the village or in the city neighborhood or in a school or college or wherever there are electives and communities are forming and being self-defined, says Ashish Kothari.

Ashish tells us more about his vision for the future. It’s a world, where people take back the means of production from states and corporations, and organize locally. Here progress is not measured by growth, but in terms of happiness and relationships. His is a vision of justice without the great inequalities between genders and classes we know today. It’s a world where humans are much more in tune with nature, and their knowledge is a common good.

These are the sorts of things we are seeing already in hundreds of initiatives in India, thousands across the world. And I think the more we are able to network them, bring them together, the more we can actually practice, bring into practice, a very very different vision for what the world would look like in 2050, says Ashish Kothari.

Does it sound idealistic? Well, yes. But idealism is the start of any meaningful process of change. And it’s about time that we take our knowledge on crucial issues like climate change and social justice, and turn them into reality.

This is a radical change in the view that we have. So, in other words, moving from the globe to the home, to the Oikos which is the word that is in the word ecology and in the word economy. Starting to shape together an alternative house, an alternative home for us, and not considering the globe as an abstract thing that can be organized from above, and managed from above and reproduce the logic of management as the solution to our problems, says Barbara Muraca.

The first photograph of planet Earth was taken in the late 1960’s. It made us conscious of the fragile place that we share. But it also planted a bias into our minds: That any solution to a global problem must be global in scale as well. But maybe that’s not true. We can start on the ground now, and develop our own, local solutions. In this respect, climate change is a wake-up call, and a real opportunity: To change our world for the benefit of everyone.

The post The great transition – Alternative paths for a better and climate just future appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In the last few months I have been focusing on the ways in which the category human has been applied across time by human governing systems – in particular white-supremacist imperialist capitalist systems – as a lens through which to think about the resurgence of anti-blackness that is currently sweeping the world (in continuity to the well-erased profound historical contexts).

This trail of thought ensued in November 2015, when I joined the Black Women’s March in Brasilia. The march was part of a feminist global organizing platform for movement building, strengthening solidarities and critical rethinking of alternatives in relation to emergent post-capitalist rhetorics. The diverse conversations around Afro-Brazilian women’s rights to negotiate their thoughts, bodies and roles in Brazil’s democratic state were all underpinned by narratives of the racist structures that are silencing, commodifying (not metaphorically, there is a history of black bodies being circulated as commodities), overexploiting, victimizing and killing the Afro Brazilian population – dating all the way back to slavery.

In the conversations building up to the march, community workers from across the Americas and the African continent met to share the contexts of their different geographies and collate new organizing principles. What became apparent in this conversation was the similarity in the lived experiences of young black people in these different contexts. Young black people find themselves faced with a (non)choice which comes down to either assimilation into capitalism (with an understanding that assimilation can, but does not necessarily mean benefiting i.e. we see black elites who assimilate and benefit and we also see the majority of black people assimilated as labor to be consumed) or, if one refuses assimilation, disposability through criminalization of poor black youths usually resulting in imprisonment or death.

As each person gave their organizing backgrounds from the Favela’s in Brazil and the urban- poor youth in Kenya to black communities in the US, there was a realization that the common denominator in the shared experiences of extreme violence and criminalization, was being black and unwanted within white- neoliberal- systems.

In Rio, 2012 preparations for the World cup put a lime light on the persistent racism that affects the Black Favelas. The documentation of the “clean up” process to make the city “safe” for the games brought out the concentration of Black Residents more heavily in the substandard, precarious urban spaces effectively reserved for those without full rights

Perhaps one of the most well known campaigns around this has been #BlackLivesMatter which ensued after the outrage over the number of young black and brown men criminalized, imprisoned and killed by the police in the United States. With the last mapping being, the profiling, abductions and killings of poor black youth in Kenya to control and protect property.

Grounded in these conversations, it seemed fundamental to map out the collective psychosis of white supremacist thinking in late-stage capitalism within the global socio-political and economic formations. Amongst the many deployed strategies to maintain power, was (has been) the over assertion of control and silencing of the autonomy and voices of the majority of a people. The methods have varied from economic marginalization, creation of poverty, instigation of deep inequalities, eradication of diversity, excessive dispossession of the poor from their homelands for business ventures, investing in war economies, immigration restriction, and murder – through state and militarized violence etc. The use of these tactics is most ignored and prompts least consequence when used against and over the lives of a) poor and particularly b) black people.

The pervasiveness of anti-blackness across the globe suggests that whiteness is not only spread through white peoples bodies but as a system that comes to work through various bodies. It is a system that functions to primarily benefit white bodies, but also one that has realized its survival depends on the assimilation, to different degrees, of other bodies.

For instance, the language of development in the African continent is one of assimilation. It has required African states to “move on from” the doings of colonialism to maintain good relations that in return “secure” economic growth. The frenzy of “Africa Rising” has allowed the re-possession of land and exploitation of resources by different foreign interests, and their local proxies- through whole strategies, relations and tactics to dispossess, divide and rule over the lives of African peoples. These interests may no longer walk in the same bodies, as in the colonial regime, but emulate the same cultures that reinforce anti-black and anti-poor sentiments*. Take for instance the collusion between state and capital in the Marikana massacre of 2012 where police killed 34 miners for protesting the over- exploitation of their labor. Or the linkage between the U.S. war on terror rhetorics and tactics with the Kenyan state’s desire for economic and hegemonic domination, to extract resources in Somalia. Or the vicious cycle of civil war in the Congo, which has been instigated, controlled and funded by imperial powers to mine the world’s richest minerals.

As a result of this, the societies and most importantly, the land has become unbearable for African peoples to nurture and exist in, forcing immigration into foreign lands~ where the same conditions of erasure, exploitation of disposability continue. Many people do not survive the passage out of the continent. Last year only, the deaths resulting from immigration of Africans from Somalia, Sudan, Eritrea and other war torn countries- attempting to cross the Mediterranean was unfathomable. Those who do survive the passage face increasing levels of immigration restriction into Europe, paired with a cycle of deportations that amount to sending people back to their deaths. African migrants across the world face anti-black violence the most notably being the slave like conditions of exploiting labor from and murders of domestic workers in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Many of whom only return through the repatriation of their dead bodies.

There is a lens that is largely being ignored in attempts to imagine post-capitalist- futures- this missing link is a result of the evasion of the reality that capitalism is born of white supremacist thinking and domination- and is therefore directly linked to anti blackness, and consequently the erasure of black lives and futures. Unless capitalism’s origins in the project of Empire are acknowledged we will continue to hold the flawed assumption that humanness is universally agreed upon. The current circulating prescription of being human is one offered by white capitalism- and is highly fueled by control, greed and need for constant accumulation. As different societies, across the globe, increasingly invest in these structures and relations, we risk narrowing the potential for nurturing of alternative (less cannibalistic) versions of being human.

Written by Gathoni Blessol, Decolonization movement builder, Community Organizer with /TheRules.org Originally published in Pambazuka News.

Part of the Seeing Wetiko series. See all articles here.

Lead image by Francisco Goya.

The post Seeing Wetiko: White Supremacy as Cultural Cannibalism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Two years ago when he was 14, my son Matthew grew six inches. Last year he only grew two inches, and this year he has only grown half an inch. Should I be worried?

Of course not. At a certain stage of maturity, quantifiable physical growth slows and stops, and a new mode of development takes over.

Imagine that I did not understand that, and fed Matthew growth hormones in a desperate attempt to keep him growing taller. And imagine that this effort was harming his health and depleting my resources. “I have to find a way to make his growth sustainable,” I would say. “Maybe I can use herbal hormones.”

Our civilization is at a similar transition point in the nature of its development. For thousands of years we have grown — in population, in energy consumption, in land under cultivation, in bits of data, in economic output. Today we are beginning to realize that this kind of growth is no longer possible, nor even desirable; that it can be maintained only at greater and greater cost to human beings and the planet.

The time has come to shift to a different kind of development, development that is qualitative rather than quantitative, better and not more. I wish our policy elites would understand this. Case in point: the new U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) convey real concern and care for the environment. Yet at the same time they are wedded to the ideology of economic growth — more GDP, more industrial infrastructure, roads, ports, etc. — without considering whether other forms of development could better meet their goals of poverty elimination and ecological sustainability.

The way out of poverty for the “least developed countries,” the SDG prescribes, is to develop export industries to raise GDP (targeting 7% growth). Unfortunately, in many countries this strategy has proven to be a recipe for more poverty, not less. The wealth usually ends up in the hands of local elites, the corporations who extract the resources, and the financial institutions that lend the money for the development. How else to make one’s country “attractive to investors” but to guarantee that they will extract more money than they put in? It is no wonder that while global GDP has nearly tripled since 1990, the number of people suffering food insecurity has also risen, and the middle class has stopped growing or even shrank in many countries.

Then there are the environmental consequences. What are these countries going to export, if not timber, mining products, and other natural resources, along with raw labor power? What else could the roads and ports be used for? The SDGs propose more of the same while hoping for a different result – a good definition of insanity.

A closer examination of what economic growth really is will illuminate the point. Economic growth, as conventionally measured, refers only to goods and services exchanged for money. That means that when indigenous peasants or self-sufficient villagers stop growing and sharing their own food, stop building their own houses, stop making their own entertainment, etc., and instead go to work at factories or plantations and pay for all of these things, GDP rises and they are considered better off. Their cash incomes may have risen from nearly nothing to five dollars a day, but they are now at the mercy of global markets. When commodity prices plummet (as they are now), when their nation’s currencies fall (as they are now), local prices rise and they are plunged into destitution. This would not happen if they retained some independence from the global commodity economy.

Only if we take the standard development model for granted is economic growth a necessity to alleviate poverty. In a system where all money is created as interest-bearing debt, it is a mathematical certainty that poverty and wealth inequality will increase unless income (the ability to service debt) grows faster than the debt itself. The income of many countries and people is now falling, leaving only one option to make debt payments: austerity. Austerity and (conventional) development are two sides of the same coin. Both are geared to opening a country to export its wealth. The prescriptions of austerity – privatization of public assets, removal of trade barriers, removal of labor protections, deregulation, cutting of pensions and wages – are precisely the same as the neoliberal prescription for economic development. These measures make a country more “attractive to investment.”

So let’s stop taking this system for granted. First, let’s address poverty by encouraging resiliency and independence from global markets, in particular through local food autonomy, local control of resources, decentralized political institutions, and decentralized infrastructure that isn’t predicated on generating foreign exchange. Second, let’s remove the underlying driver of the compulsion to monetize – the national and private debts that have been the prime implements of colonialism since explicit colonialism ended in the 1960s. (The SDGs, laudably, make mention of debt reduction. This needs to happen on a massive scale.) Third, let’s start talking about fundamental reform of our broken, debt-based financial system, which both drives economic growth and requires growth to survive. It throws everyone into competition with everyone else, propelling a “race to the bottom” that cannot end until the entire planet has been converted into product.

Switching from chemical to herbal growth stimulants (“green” or “sustainable” development) isn’t going to solve the problem. If development equals growth, then “sustainable development” is an oxymoron. Poverty and ecocide are baked into the cake. It is time to transition to a world in which wealth no longer means more and more.

Originally published in the Huffington Post.

The post Sustainable Development: Something New or More of the Same? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

American Progress, painted by John Gast 1872

There are many problems I could talk about, but I’m going to stick to the ones that are most relevant to the topic of Place-based practice:

1. The version of prosperity that Daniel Altman, the author of that article, is talking about is not good for the planet and is killing us all.
2. We need to stop creating greenhouse gasses. We need to drive fewer cars, eat less meat, create less waste, own fewer things. The economy that Altman is talking about is exactly the thing that got us into this mess to begin with. Why would we want to bring people who are living much more lightly on the Earth up to the level of Earth-abuse that Western societies need to learn to live without?
3. Factory jobs are not flexible and create more problems for families — especially mothers with small children — than the paltry wages they bring can solve.
   Anyone who has lived on a poverty wage in a developed country knows the problems that having a job can create. You lose control of your time. If you are a parent, as if it weren’t enough that you lose time with your children, on top of that you usually have to pay someone else to watch your children while you work. If you are very lucky, you might have a parent or a friend who helps for free, but who is providing for their living expenses? Even if you don’t have children, factory jobs create suffering that comes from being treated like an interchangeable part in the machine of industry.
4. Expecting people to give up the socially rich, connected community life in their villages to move to the city and get a factory job is just an extension of the colonization process.
   Colonization involves more than just taking over land. It involves telling the people who were in a place already that they have to change the way that they think, live, and act. Colonization starts with the idea in the minds of the colonizers that they have the one true, right and best way to live and that everyone else has to adapt to “progress”.

All of these things touch on the One Gazillion Dollar Question:

How can we live in a way that doesn’t destroy our planet?

I decided some time ago that the first step is to realize that the idea of progress, the key notion that got us into this mess, has got to go. I may sound like a neo-Luddite. I guess I am.

I believe that humans are not just tool-using apes, we are technology-developing apes. Technological development is part of the creativity that makes us tick. But not all technology is progress, nor is it all needed, nor is uniform “progress” necessary across the globe. In fact, one of the things that has saved us up till now, and may save some of our species in the future, is that there is still a diversity of ways that humans live on this planet that ranges from grass huts and hammocks to glass skyscrapers and memory-foam beds.

It’s time for us to stop thinking that improving the lives of others means making them live more like us. It’s time to start asking what technologies people in “less developed countries” can teach us about. It’s time to start asking what people who don’t have 9-5 jobs think of as the most important goals in their lives. It’s time to start asking what kind of improvements they want to see in their homes, in their villages and the wider world. And then its time to figure out how we can learn from the best parts of their lives.

The US uses more energy per capita than any other nation on Earth. US households use more electricity, more gas and more water than households in other countries. Even more than the most wealthy European countries! Why?! Look around and start asking how you can live a better life right where you are. How can you spend less of the earth’s resources? How can you spend more time with your children? How can you get to know your neighbors better?

Once you’ve figured out how to be a little bit less harsh on the planet and nicer to your kids, the next big step is to look around and see if you can stop supporting the industrial economy that’s destroying the world — entirely.

Oof! There, I said it.

I don’t even know if it’s possible. Can we, people who live in North America, Europe, or the more developed nations of the East actually find a way to disconnect ourselves from the machines of industry that have destroyed our planet and our lives? We’re going to have to find a way if we are to survive, because, frankly, it’s the factories that are using far more resources than the homes and cars are. It’s the stuff we buy. It’s the places we work. It’s the way we build for war and then go to war and feed other people’s war. It’s the way we strip minerals from the ground. It’s the way we frack the ground to get the last drops of natural gas.

We are destroying the world and telling other people that they are “poor” unless they are destroying the planet with us. That’s completely nuts. It’s time for us to forget the idea that the life we live represents “progress” and find new ways of thinking.

The post De-Colonizing Ourselves So We Can Help Others appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The two positions I’ve described each harbor hidden assumptions about the nature of change that set them into irreconcilable opposition. The radical critique gives the system primacy over the individuals that make it up, and concludes that change must originate on the system level. The opposing position gives primacy to the base level and doesn’t recognize that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In truth, the system arises from the totality of its constituents, and then conditions its constituents to perpetuate the system. System and constituents form a unified whole. That means that disruption at any level is equally revolutionary.

As an American visiting South Africa I was struck by the near ubiquity of domestic servants among white South Africans. Households that are in all other ways decidedly middle class have at least one and often two or three domestic servants. This bespeaks the enormous inequality of wealth that prevails in that country, one of the most unequal in the world. It is, of course, incompatible with a healthy, just society, and it goes hand in hand with another striking phenomenon there: the prevalence of security systems, razor wire, electric fences, etc. protecting nearly every white home (and those of wealthy blacks, Indians, and coloreds too).

System-wide, it is not a pretty scenario: extreme poverty creating a huge pool of people desperate to be nannies and gardeners. On the level of the individual household, though, the matter is more complicated. Sometimes these workers practically become part of the family. Is it wrong to hire them and thereby participate in the capitalist system of privilege and exploitation? Or is it one’s duty as a privileged person to offer employment to impoverished people who are desperate for it? In South Africa, as in many countries with a high degree of wealth inequality, many people consider it a social obligation to hire servants if you can afford them – even if you don’t really need to. It is incumbent upon a person of means to take care of the less fortunate.

The same debate applies more generally, to the realm of philanthropy, charity, and any work that directly benefits the less fortunate without changing the system. A leftist critique of these goes something like this: “Sure, treating the domestic help well, giving to charity, housing the homeless, even walking an old lady across the street… these are all nice, but they do nothing to change the exploitative, ecocidal system of global capitalism. On the contrary, charity, philanthropy, and individual acts of kindness only perpetuate that system. Here’s how:

(1) By ameliorating some of its worst consequences, they make capitalism all the more palatable.

(2) They divert altruistic energy toward relatively innocuous goals instead of toward addressing the systemic foundations of injustice.

(3) They appease the conscience and make one’s own complicity more acceptable.

(4) They generate a codependent relationship with the needy, in which the charitable enterprise depends for its survival on the very conditions it ostensibly seeks to address.

It occurs to me that the above critique invites a precise inversion, which might go like this: “All of your social and political activism, your focus on the big picture, the system, etc. is an escape from dealing with the immediate needs of the people right in front of your face. It diverts energy away from your human responsibilities, enabling you to be an unforgiving, callous person, an inattentive parent, a bad neighbor, absolving yourself of responsibility in those realms because, after all, you are busy doing the Big Important Things. It is just an ideological cover for your failure to look after your brother.” Here is the inversion of the radical’s critique, point by point:

(1) By heartlessly failing to respond to the worst effects of capitalism, it makes capitalism intolerable, thereby justifying radicalism’s own premises.

(2) Political radicalism diverts altruistic energy toward idealistic, unattainable goals, instead of toward meeting real and present human needs.

(3) It allows the radical to absolve himself of guilt over failing to take care of his fellows, with the excuse that, after all, I’m working on changing the system.

(4) It generates a codependent relationship with the oppressors: their persecution validates the worldview of the radical, whose identity depends on the very institutions he seeks to overthrow.

To these four I would like to add a fifth critique (and its inversion) that applies more to the level of NGOs and development aid, but also indirectly to the mentality of the rescuer in general.

(5) Charity subsumes local self-sufficiency, local cultures of reciprocity and mutual aid, cultural traditions and identity, and so on under the “helper’s” worldview that says in effect, “I know what you need better than you do, and can provide it better than you can.” It is an instrument of colonization and hegemony that disrespects and disempowers the very people it purports to help.

(5) Radical political ideologies are themselves born in the context of, and in reaction to, the dominant culture, and are still the creatures of that culture. They take the aspirations and desires of the oppressed and feed them through an ideological filter devised by an intellectual elite. Operating by them, one risks imposing a subtle form of colonization and hegemony over the very people one purports to liberate.

Reading the radical critique and its inversion, I agree with both sides! What might be a synthesis of these poles?

First, much of the difference between these two positions stems from one’s assumptions about whether deep systemic change is even possible. When I think of the person paying his servants well, giving to charity, and fulfilling the obligations of wealth as prescribed by bourgeois morality, I am reminded of the ancient Chinese ideal of the Confucian gentleman, discharging the duties of his station with humanity and integrity. Confucian thought, as I understand it, does not question the earthly order in which there will always be the emperor, the nobles, the officials, the gentlefolk, and so on down the line to the beggars; therefore, it is for each person to seek the most enlightened enactment of his or her role. As such, Confucianism, like similar medieval philosophies, could be said to be an enabling ideology of feudalism: the social order is ordained by heaven.

What if, more than an enabling philosophy, it is also a description of reality? What if there is some kind of karmic necessity for every possible life situation to coexist on earth, so that the karmic path of each person, and the human drama generally, might unfold toward its completion? I hesitate to consign a tradition as rich and nuanced as Confucianism to a ready category (an enabler of feudalism) defined within Western political thought. I think there is more to the Confucian view – and by extension, the inversion of the radical critique outlined above – than meets the eye.

The Confucian view I have described would seem profoundly conservative in its political implications: the worldly order enjoys a divine mandate: God has made some into blue-bloods and others into beggars. Who are we to interfere in the divine order of things? However, inherent in the idea that the present order has been necessary for the human drama to play out is an evolutive implication: that once it has played out, the present order becomes no longer necessary. It holds the potential for a turning of the age, and indeed that concept lurks within traditional Chinese thought as the millenarian ideal of the Tai Ping, or great peace. Radical social change was inescapably part of such ideals: witness for example the call for egalitarian land reform in the Zhouli (a Confucian classic) and in the writings of the Confucian/Taoist sage Mencius.

What these classics say to me is that humanity and compassion on the level of personal interactions between the privileged and the oppressed, between the fortunate and the unfortunate, need not be separate from, nor opposed to, actions to change the system of oppression.

The two positions I’ve described each harbor hidden assumptions about the nature of change that set them into irreconcilable opposition. The radical critique gives the system primacy over the individuals that make it up, and concludes that change must originate on the system level. The opposing position gives primacy to the base level and doesn’t recognize that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In truth, the system arises from the totality of its constituents, and then conditions its constituents to perpetuate the system. System and constituents form a unified whole. That means that disruption at any level is equally revolutionary.

Perhaps we could look at acts of direct human-level compassion as complements to, not substitutes for, action on a social or political level. I can offer two reasons why. For one thing, they come from the same place: a desire to serve the well-being of something beyond the separate self. What we practice on a personal level conditions us to act from the same place generally. To choose care for another over self-interest, for example to sacrifice comfort and security to serve an aging parent or disabled child for years and years, takes a kind of courage, trust, and fortitude – no different than the courage required to confront injustice, the trust required to make peace, or the fortitude required to persevere in the face of political setbacks.

Secondly, consider what lies at the foundation of the system of oppression. In South Africa, a man from the townships told me that the reason his people acquiesce so readily to the economic status quo is that, after five hundred years of colonialism, they have almost no self-esteem or independent identity left. They hardly dare believe they deserve better. No longer embracing ubuntu, the young generation in particular fills the void left by the destruction of their traditional story of the people (my words not his) with consumerism, individualism, and all the rest. They, like most people living in civilization, have been infected by the Story of Separation, within which our economic system, our exploitative relationship to nature, our deterrence-based criminal justice system, agricultural system, medical practices, and so forth make sense.

One of the main themes I’ve explored in my recent work is that any act that disrupts or contravenes the Story of Separation is also a political act. Any act of forgiveness, generosity, courageous service, or unconditional love violates the basic assumptions of the world-view that underpins our civilization. After all, what kind of life experience generates the fear, the insecurity, the desire to dominate and control that motivate our politics, economy, criminal punishment system, and so on? By offering people exceptions to this kind of life experience, we erode the foundation of our system.

This includes interactions with people on lower (or higher) socioeconomic positions. If the relationship is one of genuine dignity and respect (as opposed to patronizing “help”), it weakens the psychological and narrative foundations of the system, contrary to the radical’s critique. Imagine yourself as a desperately poor slum-dweller. What will be your experience of the world, your view of yourself and human nature, if you are consistently treated with coldness, dehumanization, and contempt (whether patronizing or cruel)? You will probably internalize this treatment, becoming resentfully docile, or exploding out in violent reaction to it. If we want a different result, we must create different conditions.

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