In this article, Shukaitis surveys “the particular role outer space and extraterrestrial voyage play within the radical imagination.” In particular, he sees , and a way to construct utopian worlds that give meaning to our struggles for justice in this world here and now. In autonomist Marxist terms, it presents fictional scenarios of what autonomists call “recomposition” — rebuilding, under our own hegemony, the social spaces and institutions that have been destroyed and atomized by capitalism — in an outer space setting. It was “a forward projection of an outside to capitalism enabling a space of possibility in the present.”

Leftist social criticism has displayed an ambivalent set of attitudes towards outer space — attitudes that mirror the dichotomy between the techno-utopian and primitivist or technophobic strands of the Left. Although many see outer space (whether in fictional scenarios or real agenda) as an arena for building post-capitalism and lifting the earth itself out of its current state, some quarters see it as a frivolous diversion of resources from fixing poverty and inequality here on earth.

Perhaps an interesting question… is not so much a question of whether there is a presence of outer space imagery and extraterrestrial travel residing within the workings of the social imaginary, but of their function. Their presence is felt both when the poet and songwriter Gil Scott-Heron complains that he can’t pay his doctor bills or rent and wonders what could be done with all the resources that would be available if they weren’t being spent on getting ‘Whitey on the Moon’ (1971), and when Stevie Wonder contrasts the utopian conditions of ‘Saturn’ (1976), which are peaceful and free from capitalist exchange, with conditions and problems of the urban ghettos.

Outer space is a favorite setting for radical treatment, Shukaitis argues, because “the unknown and the mysterious are almost by definition of particular fascination to those crafting mythopoetic narratives and imagery.”

This has long been true of imaginary settings other than outer space, I would note, going back to ancient festivals (recounted by James Scott in Domination and the Arts of Resistance) in which the world was turned upside-down for a day and the social order inverted, medieval peasant utopias like Cockaigne, the 20th century hobo utopia of Big Rock Candy Mountain, and Jimi Hendrix’s vision of an Atlantean escape from the ugliness of war and capitalism in the “1983” suite.

The ruling classes have been aware of the subversive potential of such speculation, Shukaitis writes, as demonstrated by the post-WWII wave of repression against utopian collectivism in fiction and the corresponding popularity of anti-collectivist themes in works like 1984 and Invasion of the Body Snatchers that treat any alternative to “our free enterprise system” and the American model of individualism as a totalitarian dystopia. And as the latter example indicates, themes of alien invasion have been used to play up xenophobia against other nations of our own species.

This does not mean, of course, that technological utopianism as such has not been used in the dominant narrative. As Shukaitis points out, American-style “rugged individualism” and the export of the “pioneer spirit” to the frontiers of space were recurring theme in Golden Age science fiction.

At the same time, libertarian socialist techno-utopian themes were seen as a threat not just to corporate capitalism as a system of power, but to authoritarian state communism. Although “early efforts towards cybernetic communism were initially developed within the Soviet Union,” they were ultimately repressed because the party “feared, rightly, that they could not control it.” (Actually, if I recall correctly, it was the Soviet military leadership that vetoed conversion of the military’s computer network into the backbone of a civilian Internet as was done with Arpanet in the United States.)

Shukaitis can’t let the theme of radically utopian treatments of outer space pass without mentioning one of the most bizarre examples, that of the dissident Trotskyite Juan Posadas, who not only hoped advanced aliens would export communism to the earth, but looked forward to a devastating nuclear war as the trigger for revolution and post-capitalist transformation.

Getting back to our earlier dichotomy between positive and negative views of technology on the Left, anarcho-primitivism “does not find much considered redeemable” in the space travel genre, any more than it does in technology in general. This determinist view of technological development, Shukaitis says, is a form of mystification that reflects their unfamiliarity with it, and ignores the radically divergent alternatives presented by technology depending on the nature of the structural power framework into which it is integrated.

In language that echoes David Graeber, Shukaitis notes that the actual development of technology under late capitalism has been a considerable disappointment, compared to the utopian predictions in popular fiction. Technological development has been disproportionately diverted into servicing institutional needs like the Military-Industrial Complex, waste consumption to overcome the crisis of overaccumulation and idle production capacity, and the control and distribution infrastructures required by corporate globalization, and not to reducing hours of labor or making daily life more fulfilling.

This leaves us with the necessity of contesting state and capitalist control of the process of technological development, and harnessing it to our own liberatory ends. And speculative fiction, Shukaitis argues, functions as a sort of cognitive map for this purpose: “an imaginal landscape is a precondition for actually finding a northwest passage in the physical world.” In this regard, the fictional setting of outer space is more symbolic than literal, implying not so much “a conception of exodus in physical terms” as “one in terms of intensive coordinates.”

In other words a shift towards an exodus that does not leave while attempting to subtract itself from forms of state domination and capitalist valorization.

Shukaitis mentions hippie dropout communities and Italian autonomist social centers as examples of such exodus within the physical surroundings of capitalist society.

Similar themes of exodus were developed in Afrofuturist science fiction, “which as a literary and cultural movement is based on exploring the black experience through the relation between technology, science fiction and racialization.” In particular he mentions the fascinating decades-long trajectory of the Sun Ra Arkestra (including the 1974 film Space is the Place), which fused themes of libertarian alien societies, Afrocentric history and advanced technology, and related them to issues of racial oppression in the United States.

In recent decades space has become a setting for explicit Leftist development of radically utopian and anti-capitalist visions. Shukaitis quotes Eduardo Rothe, who put it as plainly (and messianically) as anyone could want in a Situationist journal in 1969. Rothe directly addresses the seizure of science from capitalism and the state by the people, and its recuperation for their own utopian goals.

Humanity will enter into space to make the universe the playground of the last revolt: that which will go against the limitations imposed by nature. Once the walls have been smashed that now separate people from science, the conquest of space will no longer be an economic or military ‘promotional’ gimmick, but the blossoming of human freedoms and fulfillments, attained by a race of gods. We will not enter into space as employees of an astronautic administration or as ‘volunteers’ of a state project, but as masters without slaves reviewing their domains: the entire universe pillaged for the workers’ councils.

(Leaving aside, obviously, the question of whether there are other people on the worlds out there who aren’t quite ready to be “pillaged.”)

As the example of Rothe suggests, the use of outer space by radical Leftists is not always utopian or fictional. There are efforts here and now to take back space exploration from government agencies and capitalist corporations, and bring it within the domain of free, cooperative, and self-organized human endeavor. Shukaitis mentions the formation of the Association of Autonomist Astronauts in 1995, in protest against the Pentagon’s militarization of space. Although they initially emerged from the radical artistic scene, they formulated (admittedly for the most part as a spur to the imagination) a five-year plan to “establish a planetary network to end the monopoly of corporations, governments and the military over travel in space.”

A more pragmatic, nuts-and-bolts vision along similar lines was presented in the fictional short story “Open Shot” in Analog science fiction magazine, about the Stallman, an open-source hardware group’s victorious entry in a private moonshot competition in a field otherwise dominated by capitalist corporations.

Although Shukaitis’s 2009 article predates most of these developments, the continuing development of cheap micro-manufacturing tools and open hardware communities since then has led to a proliferation of real-world open hardware space projects. Elon Musk’s space ventures have, at the same time, been the source of misguided but understandable hopes along the same lines. In an earlier commentary (“One Cheer for SpaceX”), I surveyed some of the current FOSS space projects and noted that even though Musk’s own corporate vision is toxic, he is nevertheless pushing space technology in cheaper, more modular, and ephemeral directions that can be pirated and otherwise recuperated by commons-based peer production for the eventual post-capitalist expansion into space.

I’m disappointed that Shukaitis didn’t give Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy the attention it deserved, as a fictional scenario of a viable libertarian socialist society being developed on another planet, and providing a demonstration effect for the oppressed peoples of earth that was a real and present danger to the power structure.

In contrast to Robinson’s relatively optimistic visions in the Mars Trilogy and 2312, the television series The Expanse presents a dystopian vision of a solar system under the hegemony of exploitative capitalist corporations.

My own guess is that the truth is a lot closer to Robinson’s vision than to that of the TV show, and capitalist and state technologies of control are simply not equal to the requirements of maintaining hegemony over people living and working off-planet. Once the first mining colonies and space habitats are set up in the asteroid belt, or the first colonies on the moon and Mars, I suspect earth’s government agencies and corporations will quickly discover that whatever contractual arrangements they’ve made with the inhabitants of space — and whatever absentee titles they have to the land and resources those people are working — aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. In that case the future of space will be post-capitalist regardless of what happens here on earth, and may well provide leverage for the transition here at home.

Photo by SerenityRose

The post Essay of the Day: “Space is the (non)place: Martians, Marxists, and the outer space of the radical imagination” appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Chris Hedges: A number of the reigning oligarchs—among them Mark Zuckerberg (net worth $64.1 billion), Elon Musk (net worth $20.8 billion), Richard Branson (net worth $5.1 billion) and Stewart Butterfield (net worth $1.6 billion)—are calling for a guaranteed basic income. It looks progressive. They couch their proposals in the moral language of caring for the destitute and the less fortunate. But behind this is the stark awareness, especially in Silicon Valley, that the world these oligarchs have helped create is so lopsided that future consumers, plagued by job insecurity, substandard wages, automation and crippling debt peonage, will be unable to pay for the products and services offered by the big corporations.

The oligarchs do not propose structural change. They do not want businesses and the marketplace regulated. They do not support labor unions. They will not pay a living wage to their bonded labor in the developing world or the American workers in their warehouses and shipping centers or driving their delivery vehicles. They have no intention of establishing free college education, universal government health or adequate pensions. They seek, rather, a mechanism to continue to exploit desperate workers earning subsistence wages and whom they can hire and fire at will. The hellish factories and sweatshops in China and the developing world where workers earn less than a dollar an hour will continue to churn out the oligarchs’ products and swell their obscene wealth. America will continue to be transformed into a deindustrialized wasteland. The architects of our neofeudalism call on the government to pay a guaranteed basic income so they can continue to feed upon us like swarms of longnose lancetfish, which devour others in their own species.

“Increasing the minimum wage or creating a basic income will amount to naught if hedge funds buy up foreclosed houses and pharmaceutical patents and raise prices (in some cases astronomically) to line their own pockets out of the increased effective demand exercised by the population,” David Harvey writes in “Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason.” “Increasing college tuitions, usurious interest rates on credit cards, all sorts of hidden charges on telephone bills and medical insurance could steal away the benefits. A population might be better served by strict regulatory intervention to control these living expenses, to limit the vast amount of wealth appropriation occurring at the point of realisation. It is not surprising to find there is strong sentiment among the venture capitalists of Silicon Valley to also support basic minimum income proposals. They know their technologies are putting people out of work by the millions and that those millions will not form a market for their products if they have no income.”

The call for a guaranteed basic income is a classic example of Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci’s understanding that when capitalists have surplus capital and labor they use mass culture and ideology, in this case neoliberalism, to reconfigure the habits of a society to absorb the surpluses.

In the wake of World War II, for example, the capitalists’ problem was solved by heavy investments in the military and war industry, ideologically justified by Red baiting and the Cold War, and by massive infrastructure projects, including the building of highways, bridges and houses, to move people out of cities into suburbs, where consumption rose. The social engineering projects were done in the name of national security and progress. And they made the oligarchs of that day richer.

“The development of a whole new suburban lifestyle (acclaimed in popular TV sitcoms like The Brady Bunch and I love Lucy which celebrated a certain kind of ‘daily life of peoples’) along with all sorts of propaganda for the ‘American Dream’ of individualized homeownership stood at the centre of a huge campaign to construct new wants, needs and desires, a totally new lifestyle, in the population at large,” Harvey says in his book. “Well-paid jobs were required to support the effective demand. Labour and capital came to an uneasy compromise at the urging of the state apparatus in which a white working class made economic gains, even as minorities were left out.”

This phase of capitalism ended once industry moved overseas and wages stagnated or declined. The well-paying unionized jobs disappeared. Jobs became menial and inadequately compensated. Poverty expanded. The oligarchs began to mine government social services, including education, health care, the military, intelligence gathering, prisons and utilities such as electricity and water, for profit. As a publication of the San Francisco Federal Reserve reportedly noted, the country—and by extension the oligarchs—could no longer get out of crises “by building houses and filling them with things.” The United States shifted in the 1970s from what the historian Charles Maier called an “empire of production” to “an empire of consumption.” In short, we began to borrow to maintain a lifestyle and an empire we could no longer afford.

Profit in the “empire of consumption” is extracted not by producing products but by privatizing and pushing up the costs of the basic services we need to survive and allowing banks and hedge funds to impose punishing debt peonage on the public and gamble on tech, student debt and housing bubbles. The old ideology of the New Deal, of government orchestrating huge social engineering projects under the Public Works Administration or in the War on Poverty, was replaced by a new ideology to justify another form of predatory capitalism.

In Harvey’s book “A Brief History of Neoliberalism” he defines neoliberalism as “a project to achieve the restoration of class power” in the wake of the economic crisis of the 1970s and what the political scientist Samuel Huntington said was America’s “excess of democracy” in the 1960s and the 1970s. It achieved its aim.

Neoliberalism, Harvey wrote, is “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”

American oligarchs discredited the populist movements of the 1960s and 1970s that had played a vital role in forcing government to carry out programs for the common good and restricting corporate pillage. They demonized government, which as John Ralston Saul writes, “is the only organized mechanism that makes possible that level of shared disinterest known as the public good.” Suddenly—as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, two of the principal political proponents of neoliberalism, insisted—government was the problem. The neoliberal propaganda campaign successfully indoctrinated large segments of the population to call for their own enslavement.

The ideology of neoliberalism never made sense. It was a con. No society can effectively govern itself by basing its decisions and policies on the dictates of the marketplace. The marketplace became God. Everything and everyone was sacrificed on its altar in the name of progress. Social inequality soared. Amid the destruction, the proponents of neoliberalism preached the arrival of a new Eden once we got through the pain and disruption. The ideology of neoliberalism was utopian, if we use the word “utopia” as Thomas More intended—the Greek words for “no” and “place.” “To live within ideology, with utopian expectations, is to live in no place, to live in limbo,” Saul writes in “The Unconscious Civilization.” “To live nowhere. To live in a void where the illusion of reality is usually created by highly sophisticated rational constructs.”

Corporations used their wealth and power to make this ideology the reigning doctrine. They established well-funded centers of propaganda such as The Heritage Foundation, took over university economic departments and amplified the voices of their courtiers in the media. Those who questioned the doctrine were cast out like medieval heretics, their careers blocked and their voices muted or silenced. The contradictions, lies and destruction within neoliberal ideology were ignored by those who dominated the national discourse, leading to mounting frustration and rage among a populace that had been abandoned and betrayed.

Read the full text here.

Photo by Wendy Longo photography

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And the more we grow, the more we eat away at the web of life on which we all depend.

We have known about this problem for decades now, but we’ve been told not to worry: As technology improves and becomes more efficient, we’ll be able to keep growing the economy while nonetheless reducing our impact on the natural world. The technical term for this is “green growth,” which requires absolute decoupling of GDP from material use. According to the theory, we can speed this process along by incentivizing innovation; if we tax carbon emissions and material extraction, we can spur companies to invest in more efficient tech.

It sounds great, it’s promoted at the highest levels by tech billionaires like Elon Musk and international organizations like the World Bank and the United Nations, and it sits right at the center of big global plans like the Paris Climate Accord and the Sustainable Development Goals. We’re all hanging our collective future on this hope. But is it really possible?

Here’s the magic number: 50 billion tons. That’s how much of the Earth’s materials and life forms we can safely use each year. That includes everything from wood to plastic, fish to livestock, minerals to metals: all the physical stuff that we consume. Right now, we’re using about 80 billion tons each year–way over the limit. So for growth to be green, we need to somehow get back down to 50 billion tons despite expanding the GDP.

When green growth theory was first proposed, there was no evidence on whether it would actually work–it was purely speculative. But over the past few years, three major studies have set out to examine this question. All have arrived at the same rather troubling conclusion: Even under best-case scenario conditions, absolute decoupling of GDP growth from material use is not possible on a global scale.

It was a team of scientists led by Monika Dittrich that first pointed this out. They ran a model showing that under business-as-usual conditions, growth will drive global resource use to a staggering 180 billion tons per year by 2050. At more than three times the safe limit, that means game over for human civilization as we know it.

Then the team ran the model with the optimistic assumption that every nation on Earth immediately adopts best practice in efficiency, with all the best available technology. The results were a bit better: We would end up hitting 93 billion tons per year by 2050. But that’s not absolute decoupling, and it’s a far cry from anything approaching green growth.

A second team of scientists tested the same question again in 2016, and found that even aggressive measures like a carbon price as high as $250 per ton and a doubling of technological efficiency don’t do the trick. If we keep growing the global economy by 3% each year, they found, we’ll still hit about 95 billion tons by 2050. No absolute decoupling. No green growth.

Finally, last year the United Nations itself weighed in on the debate, hoping to settle the matter once and for all. It modelled a carbon price rising to a whopping $573 per ton, added a material extraction tax, and assumed rapid tech innovation spurred by strong government policy. The results? We hit 132 billion tons by 2050–even worse than the two previous studies found. Worse because this time the scientists included the “rebound effect”in their model. As gains in efficiency reduce the cost of commodities, demand for those commodities goes up, cancelling out some of the reductions in material use.

And let’s not forget: All three of these models use radically optimistic assumptions. We’re a long way from even testing a global carbon tax, much less a tax of $573 per ton; and we’re not on track to double our efficiency. In fact, quite the opposite: Right now our efficiency is getting worse, not better.Why the bad news? The main reason is that tech innovation just doesn’t work the way most of us assume. We know that Moore’s law says that chip performance doubles about every two years–but this doesn’t apply to material use. There are physical limits to material efficiency, and once we start to reach them then the scale effect of growth drives material use back up in the long run. For instance you might be able to produce a wooden table more efficiently, but you can’t produce a table out of nothing. In the end you’ll need a minimum amount of wood, and once you reach that limit, then any growth in table production is going to come along with a corresponding growth in wood use.

It would be hard to overstate the impact of these results. Right now, our only plan for dealing with the ecological emergency that’s staring us in the face is to hope that tech innovation and green growth will mitigate the coming disaster. Yes, we’re going to need all the wizardry we can get–but that alone is not going to be enough. The only real option is in fact much simpler and more obvious: We need to start consuming less.

The tricky bit is that our existing economic operating system–capitalism–has a design flaw at its core. It requires that we produce and consume more and more stuff each year. If we don’t, then firms collapse and people lose their jobs and livelihoods. So it’s time to make room for new systems to emerge–systems that don’t require endless exponential growth just to stay afloat. This is where we need to focus our creative energy, rather than clinging to the false hope of “green growth” fantasies.

There are lots of ways to get there. We could start by ditching GDP as an indicator of success in favor of a more balanced measure like the Genuine Progress Indicator, which accounts for negative “externalities” like pollution and material depletion. We could roll out a new money system that doesn’t pump our system full of interest-bearing debt. And we could start thinking about putting caps on material use, so that we never extract more than the Earth can regenerate.

The old generation of innovators believed that tech would allow us to subdue nature and bend it to our will. Our generation is waking up to a more hopeful truth: that our survival depends not on domination, but on harmony.

Jason Hickel is an anthropologist at the University of London who works on international development and global political economy, with an ethnographic focus on southern Africa. He writes for the Guardian and Al Jazeera English. His most recent book, The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets, is available now.

Photo by eelke dekker

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Christian Villum: Giants such as Google and IBM have lately been followed by Canadian D-Wave, the leading developer of quantum computers, which opened up parts of their platform in January. But it’s not just the large, financially strong American technology companies who are painting the picture of open source as a global megatrend. Start-ups and small to medium-sized companies all over the world, and not just within the tech industry, are creating new and exciting open source-based physical products. 3D Robotics, Arduino and the British furniture company Open Desk, which is creating open design furniture in collaboration with 600 furniture creators all over the world, are just a few examples of how open source has become the foundation of some of the most innovative and interesting business models of our time.

Danish Design Centre has dived into this trend for the past year; a trend which is part of a large wave of technological disruption and digitization and which is currently top of mind for many companies. How do you get started with digitizing your business model, and how do you know if open source manufacturing is the future of your company? These questions aren’t easy to answer.

Growth programme for curious Danish production companies

This is why we, in collaboration with a range of partners, have initiated REMODEL, which is a growth programme for Danish manufacturing companies who wish to explore and develop new business models based on open-source principles, and which are tailor-made to fit their industry and their specific situation. REMODEL demystifies a complex concept and helps the company develop economically sustainable business models which can open op new markets and new economies.

We do this by using strategic design tools, which make up the foundation of the programme, and which are based on strong design virtues such as iterative experimentation, the development of rapid prototypes and most importantly, focusing on the needs of the end-user. On top of this, REMODEL also involves a global panel of experts, CEOs and researchers within the field of open source, which allows the programme to pull on expertise from some of the world’s most visionary innovators.

Timeline for the programme

REMODEL consists of a series of design-driven stages. Last year the programme was launched in a testing phase in which the Danish Design Centre collaborated with a handful of Danish manufacturing companies, including renowned hifi-manufacturing company Bang & Olufsen, who went through early modules of the programme over the course of the spring 2017. These modules were reiterated along the way based on the feedback from those tests.

The key learnings from these test as well as workshops with members of the expert panel then became the foundation for the official REMODEL programme, which launched on February 5, 2018, and where 10 pioneering companies are currently working their way through the programme, which has been set up as an 8 week design sprint. The outcome is for them to have gained a thorough strategic understand of the concept of open source hardware as it relates to their industry and furthermore a draft strategy to open one of the existing products in their portfolio.

Radical sharing of knowledge

Learnings, tools and methods from both the test runs and the main programme will be collected and shared in a REMODEL open source hardware business model toolkit, which will be freely available after the program.

On top of this we will be organising a REMODEL knowledge sharing summit in October 2018, where participating companies, the international expert panel, prominent speakers and anyone else who are interested are invited to Denmark to share their experiences and think about the next steps for open sourced-based business models and strategies for manufacture companies.

Discussing REMODEL internationally

In March 2018, Danish Design Centre is yet again participating in the world’s largest technology event, SXSW Interactive, in Austin, Texas. We have been invited to host a panel debate as part of the official schedule under the title ‘Open Source Innovation: The Internet on Your Team‘, where speakers from Bang & Olufsen, Thürmer Tools and Wikifactory will discuss the topic in general as well as tell stories from the REMODEL program.

Learn more

Curious to follow the REMODEL program in more depth? Read more here or sign up for the newsletter. Eager to discuss? Join the conversation on Twitter under the #remodelDK hashtag or contact Danish Design Centre Programme Director Christian Villum on [email protected]

Originally published in danskdesigncenter.dk

Lead image: Open Desk builds furniture as open design. (c) Rory Gardiner

Text image: CC-BY-NC Agnete Schlichtkrull

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Aaron Bastani: The coming out party for climate change as an issue of global relevance was the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. Since then, the relationship between energy and the economy has only become more political, with citizens across the Global North and South ever more aware of the challenges it poses. In fact, a 2017 poll conducted by Pew across 38 countries showed 61% of respondents view climate change as a major concern, placing it above traditional geopolitics, migration and a failing economic model in terms of perceived threat.

And yet increased public awareness over the last quarter of a century has failed to translate into meaningful action. Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO₂), the principle ‘greenhouse gas’, were 61% higher in 2013 than they were in 1990. The years following the economic crisis of 2008 saw the largest annual emission increases in history.

But there isn’t just a dissonance between our knowledge of the facts and how we act. There’s also the problem of our inability to model the future with accuracy.

At present the scientific consensus is that two degrees of warming this century is highly likely. While this would present a huge shock to the global order, with unseen levels of migration, declining crop yields and a massive resource crunch, if that was as bad as it got, we would have had a lucky escape.

The reason is that anything much beyond that would see us reach a tipping point. Here a cascade of feedbacks, including desertification and methane hydrate release, would see three degrees lead to four, four to five, and five to six.

Could humanity endure a world six degrees warmer than at present? Perhaps, but with oceans too warm and acidic to maintain life, mass agriculture only possible around the north and south poles, and elevated levels of atmospheric methane – posing problems for anything that breathes – it’s difficult to imagine.

An eternal present: the tyranny of capitalist realism.

How is it possible that ever more people are aware of climate change, as well as its potentially devastating consequences, and yet so little is done? The answer is politics.

Future generations will look back on the the last 25 years and isolate two things in particular. The first is a dramatic increase in carbon dioxide emissions – and with it a further acceleration in global warming. The second is a particular economic model, globalised not only in terms of trade and production, but more importantly a framework which places profit above all else and demands circulation.

This should be understood as ‘contemporary globalisation’, something distinct from the geographical process of the same name – concurrent with it – which unfolds instead as a ‘time-space compression’ made possible by changing technologies.

Contemporary globalisation was an intentional political settlement, founded on a certain set of ideas, and while it maps over the technological and geographical phenomenon, the latter could well have developed without the former.

For contemporary globalisation the end of the Cold War was decisive, with the institutions of mid-century Western capitalism – the IMF, the WTO and the World Bank – combining with a new cultural zeitgeist of capitalist realism – the idea that the end of the world was more possible than the end of capitalism. Here, free markets were no longer understood to be a socially contingent systems, but instead the entirety of reality. The synthesis of these two elements, added to the historic absence of a competing utopia or countervailing geopolitical forces, drove a second belle epoque between 1990 and 2008. Here a specific economic system, based on constantly expanding global markets and the elimination of all friction in circulation (be it cultural, technological or economic), was crucial.

Unsurprisingly, it was primarily in the affluent countries of the Global North where capitalist realism reigned supreme. For developing nations history remained far from over, with the operative logic instead being to pursue higher standards of living, rising wages and greater prosperity. An increasingly integrated global economy, particularly after 1990, permitted the two to fit like pieces of a jigsaw: the cheap labour of a rising China in the Global South made possible the psychic economy of capitalist realism in the Global North. The former got richer, the latter felt richer. In Marxist terms, the base of the Global South made possible the superstructure of the wealthier nations.

And for a while it worked.

But in terms of climate change, this economic and cultural settlement – based on consent as much as coercion – allowed market-based solutions to remain unquestioned until after the crisis of 2008, even when it was clear they weren’t even touching the surface.

While climate change might be a result of industrial modernity, or ‘fossil capitalism’ as Andreas Malm refers to it, for the true believers that was irrelevant. To the contrary, it in fact compounded a blind faith in the ability of technology to solve almost any problem. Just as Watt’s coal-powered steam engine transformed society at the turn of the nineteenth century, similarly green technologies would underpin a similar transition in our own time. The limits of growth would expand once more. After all, capitalism was reality, history was over and nothing really changes.

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That set of presumptions, where changes in technology maintain capitalism’s ability to sustain the planet regardless, is referred to as the ‘technological fix’. This often comes in the form of carbon sequestration, geo-engineering and renewables – or a combination of all three.

The technological fix seeks to negate politics by claiming one can change social reality without changing social relations: the rich need not be less rich, disparities in income need not be reduced, consumption of goods and services need not diminish. Faced with an economic system which has failed to deliver rising living standards, this is why self-proclaimed moderates cry “innovation!” This is not a moderate position – it is a zealous one.

To an extent, there is some reason to this line of argument. Humanity, so far at least, has been able to overcome every challenge it has faced, from deadly microbes to larger predators and the turbulence of several ice ages. Each time we have not only prevailed but thrived, primarily as a result of our ability to process information and create tools – technology – in response.

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Historically, the green movement has disdained the reasoning of the technological fix, and rightly so. For the most part those pursuing them in relation to the climate – with madcap schemes like blocking part of the sun with a ‘space shade’ in order to manage solar radiation, or removing vast amounts of CO₂from the atmosphere through carbon sequestration – don’t want to save the planet, but instead prolong the economic and social system which is killing it – one based on production for exchange, profit and work.

Green politics, at its most radical, has thus insisted that an adequate response must be more fundamental. Within this was an implicit understanding of how history unfolds and change takes place. So while technological determinists understand technology as the driving force of history, and thus the only way to address climate change, radical greens understand social relations and ideas, or even relations to nature, as what really matters.

In this respect, both sides exhibit a bias. But to change history and save the world, this isn’t enough.

How we make history.

The best way to understand technology, how it internalises and shapes social relations in culture, society and the economy, is to view it as one element within a broader ensemble through which history evolves. This is how David Harvey reads the thinking of Karl Marx on the topic – with the author of Capital understanding history as constituted through six distinct but mutually adaptive fields. These are technology, nature, the process of production, the reproduction of daily life, social relations and mental conceptions. All are in dynamic tension, each constantly shaping and being shaped by all the others.

Marx wanted to understand how history was made in order to change it: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”. When you think about history as something that complex, and generated by fields which each encompass so much, you soon grasp the limits of emphasising only one.

Elon Musk, for instance, would say technology determines history, as would capitalist realism more generally. This allows it to frame constructed political realities as natural and unchanging. Meanwhile an eco-anarchist might say nature and social relations are all important: maybe if we were all vegan and cycled we would save the planet. Alternatively, Lenin would have said the production process is primary, and that without significant change there the rest is meaningless.

For Marx, however, systemic transformation – what he referred to as moving to a ‘new mode of production’ – would necessitate dealing with all of these categories together. So just as capitalism, defined by production for exchange and wage labour, emerged slowly over a period of centuries, so too would whatever succeeds it. As post-capitalists, and as humans who want to stop runaway climate change, this must inform how we now act.

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Given the timeframe within which we are now operating (we have around three decades to completely decarbonise global production while energy demand doubles), this won’t be easy. The answer is to emphasise each moment as part of a broader shift, with the need for new technologies, social relations, mental conceptions, work flows and conceptions of nature. No one sphere is sufficient.

While that might sound extremely hard, a lot of work has already been done. The work of animal rights activists and movements around changed eating habits mean that many now enjoy a very different relationship to nature. And even those of us who are not vegetarian or vegan would find the Cartesian view of other animal species as automatons not only strange but inhumane. One of the major changes in dealing with climate change will be changes in food production and consumption, with meat in particular using prolific amounts of water and land, and generating significant greenhouse gases like methane. That’s not to mention the ethics of animals as commodities.

In response, expect vegetarianism and veganism to become increasingly common in the coming decades. In addition to changed conceptions of nature, changing technology manifesting those conceptions will also matter as, in the coming years, meat substitutes become increasingly authentic and synthetic meat – flesh without animals – finds a mass market. Using far less water and land, and creating far less methane as a by-product, synthetic meat is a far more efficient conversion of solar energy to food than rearing animals – something will probably be mocked in the not-too-distant future.

Meanwhile renewable technologies are making massive leaps forward, as is energy storage. A world which has completely decarbonised production at some point in the twenty-first century is not the wet dream of tech optimists, but seemingly inevitable when you look at the falling cost of PV and wind technologies as a consequence of experience curves. The point, then, is how quickly they are rolled out and who owns them.

Similar questions will need to be answered regarding artificial intelligence, data more generally, and extracting resources beyond our planet. All of these are coming, and with them a new civilisational paradigm – as disruptive as the steam engine coupled with fossil fuels was at the dawn of the industrial revolution. What matters, for post-capitalists, is whether or not we bend the arc of history to ensure that the dividend of these technologies redounds to the emancipation of all of us – not enhancing the profits of a tiny few.

Importantly, in relation to renewable energy, diffusion needs to happen as a matter of urgency. If it doesn’t, warming in excess of two degrees seems close to certain.

Small is beautiful, big is beautiful.

Historically, all of this is anathema to the best traditions of the green movement which, since the early 1970s, have persisted with the idea of growth having limits and the importance of localising production and leading very different kinds of lives.

While it’s true that your morning commute is inefficient in every sense, and you purchase many things you don’t really need, the idea that the answer to climate change is consuming less energy – that a shift to renewables will necessarily mean a downsizing in life – feels wrong. In fact, the trends with renewables would point to the opposite: the sun furnishes our planet with enough energy to meet humanity’s annual demand in just 90 minutes. Rather than consuming less energy, developments in wind and solar (and within just a few decades) should mean distributed energy of such abundance that we won’t know what to do with it. When combined with the technologies of artificial intelligence, robots with strong sensory-motor coupling and asteroid mining, you suddenly see a society beyond scarcity in energy, resources and, most importantly, labour.

Fully automated luxury communism is green populism.

This is the vision that must be offered in response to climate change. One that accepts changed relationships to nature, especially other creatures, but which demure from green-primitivism or going ‘back to the land’. For those who do so, it will be a matter of choice rather than necessity.

In this world we need not travel less, nor no longer enjoy crops and foodstuffs from other parts of the planet. Quite the opposite – seeing the great feats of humanity and the beauty of the Earth will be the birthright of all. Life will be easier with ever more time given over to leisure rather than work. What would be the meaning of life? Well, that would be for you to decide.

This is a populist vision that understands the potentials of the present that is soon to come, seeking to shift them to a higher purpose. Fully automated luxury communism is not inevitable, and alternative scenarios are possible: rentism and artificial scarcity are just as plausible as abundance; war and mass destruction as likely as permanently cheaper clean energy. Fundamentally, though, any effective green movement must grasp these technologies or lose. Evolution has no reverse.

What’s more, this populism must be global, reconciling the needs and interests of the poorest countries with the wealthiest. The transition to renewable energy in the Global South – which will enjoy the most abundant and cheapest energy anywhere on Earth – will be made possible by technology transfer and reparations for historic injustice through the form of a global carbon tax. Decarbonising the economy won’t just save the planet, rich and poor, it will give electricity to the hundreds of millions in sub-saharan Africa and South Asia currently without it. It will underpin a level of technological catch-up unthinkable to those who associate large, centralised infrastructures with energy generation and distribution.

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But this populism will need to be pitted against contemporary globalisation, whose model privileges the free movement of goods and capital over people, and whose emphasis on borderless trade – often the default even among leftists – is the essence of the commodity fetish. This model has limited the possibility of states to decarbonise at speed, often through procurement rules centred around fair competition, something well documented by Naomi Klein in her book This Changes Everything.

Woke globalisation will not deliver the change we need, whether its environmental or economic, and a longing to break with the established order must be conjoined with the impulse to create energy abundance by moving away from fossil fuels. As Paul Mason writes:

“From George Square in Glasgow to Syntagma Square in Athens, there was always a Catalan flag waving above the crowd. I never understood until now that those flags were an essential part of the story. The “breakup” narratives of modern Europe – whether they are pulling away from nation states, currencies, free movement zones or the EU itself – are all driven by a central fact: the current settlement does not work.”

Pretending otherwise is woefully inadequate, and any green populism, at the micro or macro-level, must be alive to that. A break with fossil fuels and neoliberalism must also be a break with the current global order.

The final aspect of green populism is the recognition that states matter, and electoralism is important. For much of the last several decades, the green movement has favoured small-scale, local projects, with genres of activism which favour self-transformation, experimental togetherness and immediacy. All of this is worthwhile, and should not be dispensed with, but radical greens must understand that only states, the greatest instruments of collective action yet created by humans, can pull off what is needed.

So what does ‘pulling it off’ look like? It means the Global North completely decarbonising by 2030 and the Global South by 2040. This means countries across Europe and North America will need to reduce CO2 emissions every year by 8% in the 2020s, with the same holding true for poorer countries over the following decade.

This will require huge levels of consent, alongside the mobilisation of states in something akin to a war effort. Fortunately, people need jobs – until robots perfect sensory-motor coupling – and there are many public goods like universal health, education and housing, which should be folded within a broader project for ecological transformation and social renewal.

Populism doesn’t mean bowing to the lowest common denominator. It means seeing what people want and relaying it through a technological paradigm whose social relations are yet to be decided. It means saying ‘here is a path to limitless abundance’, rather than calling for civilisation to be placed in a straight jacket.

By understanding history as evolutionary flow, we can continue to build that project in the now – in ideas, in production and consumption models, in relations, and in technologies. Importantly, however, this must be combined with a vision of progress and inevitable destiny, with the incumbent organisations of democratic representation – states, unions and parties – the handmaidens to a radically different world.

Originally published in Novara Media.
Photo by ▓▒░ TORLEY ░▒▓

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BARRIO SOLAR was created on September 21st, the day after Hurricane Maria devastated the island nation of Puerto Rico.

Our team at BARRIO SOLAR has developed a simple and cost-effective way to ship a variety of solar devices to the island, where they will be distributed to shelters, community centers and homes – especially the small towns in the center and south of the island – where immediate aid and reconstructed power sources are least likely to be deployed.

The solar devices to be shipped to Puerto Rico will be collected and distributed by a network of 35 women’s shelters and aid organizations under the leadership of Paz para la Mujer. By partnering with these women’s networks, we will be avoiding the risk of black market profiteering and, as we are at this moment a fully volunteer network, the entire distribution effort will be done for free.

Our goal is to raise $25,000 within the next few weeks, and to have the products on the ground in Puerto Rico by the first week of December.

We have purposely limited this fundraiser to $25,000, because it will be the first run of our new distribution network, and we want to ensure that our partners at Paz para la Mujer are able to accommodate this volume of solar devices.

We have teamed up with CENSA, the Center for the Studies of the Americas in Berkeley, CA, as our fiscal sponsor. They will ensure that the funds we raise go directly to purchase the solar kits and lights noted above.

With your help, we can provide immediate relief to thousands of people in Puerto Rico, who currently have no power or fresh water.

Once our goal of $25,000 is met, we will buy the products and have them immediately shipped directly to Puerto Rico within the first week of December.

People have asked us: why bother with this initiative when so many other larger organizations are taking solar power to Puerto Rico?
Our response? We at BARRIO SOLAR are proud to be among the many organizations that are bringing fossil fuel independence to the island of Puerto Rico via solar technologies, and we are excited to be part of these self-organizing solar support networks.

Please be generous in your support for the people of Puerto Rico.

Gracias! Thank You!

Fritjof Capra, Indira Cortes and Elizabeth Hawk for BARRIO SOLAR

Click here to contribute to the campaign

The post Barrio Solar: Solar Power for Puerto Rico appeared first on P2P Foundation.

SpaceX has had considerable success developing reusable spacecraft and orbital boosters — the Dragon spacecraft has resupplied the International Space Station — and has achieved a controlled descent with tail landing by a Falcon booster.

Starting with the first Dragon spacecraft to Mars in 2018, Musk has committed himself to regular Mars runs every 26 months, using low cost vehicles (Tim Fernholz, “Elon Musk is building a supply chain to Mars,” Quartz, June 13, 2016). The goal is an affordable and predictable cargo route, in order to encourage Mars-related research and industry.

Essentially what we’re saying is we’re establishing a cargo route to Mars. It’s a regular cargo route. You can count on it. It’s going happen every 26 months. Like a train leaving the station. And if scientists around the world know that they can count on that, and it’s going to be inexpensive, relatively speaking compared to anything in the past, then they will plan accordingly and come up with a lot of great experiments.

According to Tim Fernholz,

This is akin to the way that massive container ships ply the oceans to bring components between far-flung factories. Planners don’t rely on a specific ship to make it across the Pacific at a discrete time, but instead imagine the ships as a kind of conveyor belt, constantly in motion, and plan their operations around the idea that goods are constantly in motion between two given sites.

The 2018 mission will be followed by several Dragons in 2020, and in 2022 a larger number carrying the infrastructure for a permanent base on Mars — laying the groundwork for the planned transportation of human passengers in 2024.

Speaking of which, SpaceX’s Mars project — which envisions humans living in a permanent base constructed there — is easily the most famous.

But if state-directed space exploration fizzled out, let’s not accept, as the alternative, human expansion into the solar system under the direction of corporations and billionaire venture capitalists.

Even now, there are all sorts of interesting space projects operating on relatively little capital, and taking advantage of cheap, ephemeral micro-manufacturing technology.

Copenhagen Suborbitals, for example, is an amateur, crowdfunded spaceflight program based in Denmark (Xavier Aaronson, “Spaced Out:  Open Source Outer Space,” Motherboard, Dec. 18, 2012). They use a sea-based launch platform. At the time of Aaronson’s 2012 article, the venture was “comprised of a coterie of 20-plus specialists determined to create the first homemade, manned spacecraft to go into suborbital flight.” The estimated cost of such a mission is expected to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, eventually falling to $63,000 a shot.

The project achieves enormous economies over government (and presumably corporate) bureaucracies by using off-the-shelf components whenever possible.

One man’s kitchen sink valve is another rocket man’s missing component. A D.I.Y. spaceflight project can start with a good rummage at your local plumbing or hardware store. With everyday, off-the-shelf products, the guys behind Copenhagen Suborbitals found cheaper solutions to expensive, complex systems.

“Instead of trying to invent our own valve for instance, why not buy one that’s been produced maybe a million times,” explained Kristian.

The peer-to-peer nature of the project means much faster turnaround times or iteration cycles — “OODA loops,” in the late Col. John Boyd’s words — than is possible in government or corporate bureaucracies.

Since Copenhagen Suborbitals is bereft of the red tape and regulations characteristic of federally or commercially funded space projects, Kristian explained that his team can go from a revised sketch to an improved prototype, sometimes in less than five minutes. That’s far quicker than NASA, of course, where he helped to design new moon rovers and co-authored the agency’s Human Integration Design Handbook.

As for their achievements,

so far, their accomplishments are impressive: their solid-and-liquid-fuel rocket, the HEAT-1X, is the first “amateur” rocket flown with a payload of a full-size crash test dummy, and the first to perform a successful Main Engine Cut-Off, or MECO command, and the first launched from a “low budget” sea-based platform. It’s also the most powerful amateur rocket ever flown.

Since then, Copenhagen Suborbitals has tested the Sapphire (with improved guidance and maneuver systems), and has a Nexø I & II in the work. The Spica II, the rocket actually intended to send a live person into space, is expected to be tested in 2017 (Anthony Wood, “Copenhagen Suborbitals dreams big with Spica rocket,” Gizmag, August 25, 2015).

Bitnation — a transnational network created to organize a variety of non-state governance services using the Blockchain infrastructure — has created a Bitnation Space Agency. The Agency intends to be a coordination platform for open-source space efforts around the world, and has its own Five-Year Plan for crowdfunded technology development and space missions. Iman Mirbioki (“Bitnation Space Agency,” A Blog About Nothing Particular, June 2, 2015), who co-founded the venture with Susanne Tarkowski Tempelhof, estimates BSA will radically cheapen spaceflight by eliminating administrative overhead altogether (an 80% cost reduction by itself) as well as open-sourcing all technologies. Tempelhof argues that corporate efforts like SpaceX are “just the beginning of democratizing the technology”; BSA will “take it further, not just make it accessible to people outside of the government, but also make it open source, and DIY friendly” (Jamie Redman, “BitNation and Spacechain: The Mission to Decentralize Space Exploration,” Coin Telegraph, June 22, 2015).

The Agency’s Five Year Plan (written in 2015) states a list of objectives:

1. Create a decentralized and open-source space agency.

2. Research and develop new and better technology for space-travel/space-missions.

3. Develop new eco-friendly fuel for space vehicles. (Rocket fuel)

4. Develop a new generation of navigational systems, as the current GPS accuracy and maximum performance (speed and altitude) is limited due to enforced rules by the U.S military.

5. Create a cheaper technology and platform on an open source basis that enables those with limited budgets to reach space and/or do experiments in microgravity environments.

6. Develop new and cheaper space vehicles able of reaching LEO (Low Earth Orbit), GSO (Geostationary Orbit) and other celestial bodies like the Moon or asteroids.

7. Research alternative energy sources, mainly anti-matter trapped in the Earth’s magnetic field.

8. Research and develop technology for mining minerals and resources on other celestial bodies, like the Moon or asteroids.

9. Creating communication networks and datacenters in Earth orbit, beyond the reach of any state or regime to work toward total immunity and neutrality of the future IT-infrastructure.

10. Building fuel-depots and an international network based on virtual currencies for refueling of satellites and other space vehicles.

11. Doing research in the field of space-medicine and the effects of microgravity and cosmic radiation on living organisms.

12. Doing research on the effect of cosmic radiation on electronic components in order to

develop new technology that is able to withstand the harsh environment of outer space.

The agenda of milestone projects in the Plan — including orbital satellite launches, moon shots, probes to near-earth asteroids and the deployment of a permanent space station by the end of 2020 — seems implausibly ambitious. But to be fair, even the fully and partly funded items at the top of the list (e.g. the BULLDOG rocket launch for deploying a payload in low-earth orbit is partly funded) are quite impressive. Extrapolate the Copenhagen Suborbitals and BSA model far enough and you get something like Openshot, a fictional open source moon shot in a short story by Craig DeLancey (“Openshot,” Analog Science Fiction and Fact, December 2006). The open source hardware spacecraft, the Stallman, was the product of a network of ten thousand volunteers worldwide — and it beat the big corporate players in a competition to be “the first non-governmental organization to put a person back on the moon.” Cutter, leader of one of the corporate-funded teams, warned that “the Opensource Rocket Program will have a tremendously pernicious effect on humanity and human destiny by destroying the benefit of privatizing space exploration with an unscalable stunt.” And in the ultimate irony, the Stallman‘s crew rescued Cutter’s crew and repaired his disabled ship based on crowdsourced advice from the Openshot global network.

Once you’ve bootstrapped affordable orbital ferries, the addition of 3-D printers and other cheap, open-source micromanufacturing technologies that can be used to construct interplanetary craft in orbit or construct buildings on the surface of other worlds means that the path to the entire solar system lies open. The focus by both corporate ventures like SpaceX and open-source ventures like Copenhagen Suborbital and Bitnation Space Agency, on developing bottom-up infrastructures, one step at a time, arguably amounts to backtracking to a crossroads and getting on the path that space exploration should have taken in the first place.

Blogger Jim Henley of Unqualified Offerings, in a comment at Pixel Scroll, noted that the Apollo project essentially destroyed the long-term future of the U.S. space program by diverting it away from the necessary work of building a sustainable technological ecosystem:

When I was but a lad, reading Golden Age Science Fiction like Grandpa used to write, because it was what was in the middle-school libraries back in the early 70s, I was struck by how late the dates for a first moon-landing were in stories from the 40s and 50s. I think the earliest date I encountered was maybe 1978, and some of them placed it in the 1990s. And I thought, “Hah! We already got there!”

But the mistake those Campbell-era authors made was assuming we’d do it right. That first we’d build a real space station, and develop a sustainable outer-space infrastructure, and then when we went to the Moon, go for keeps.

Instead we raced to get there with a few cans full o’ humans, hit some golf balls, planted a flag, and – bagged the whole business. By 1978, that earliest date for a moonshot I’d encountered in fiction, it was like we’d never been there at all.

Rather than organically building an entire technological ecosystem from the ground up, with infrastructures that were immediately useful in their own right at each stage, and then using the existing stage of infrastructure as the jumping off place to build the next stage when it became necessary for the needs of the existing system, Kennedy chose an arbitrary goal for its symbolic value — and the moon has since gone unvisited for forty years while the U.S. space program atrophied.

Henley also, anticipating those who point to Elon Musk’s space ventures as a hopeful sign, points out that “the private Mars foundation gang admits that their strategic plan way underestimates the likely cost.”

But it’s worth considering that the same blockbuster projects that diverted the space program from sustainability also tended to push it towards high-cost technologies beyond the reach of voluntary associations.

The effect of the space program’s focus on blockbuster projects like Apollo was to push space travel technology towards extreme capital-intensiveness, and away from the kinds of modular, granular, multi-purpose and reusable building blocks that could evolve into a sustainable technological ecosystem.

Corporate space efforts like Musk’s are a first, intermediate step towards developing an affordable, sustainable infrastructure for exploring and developing outer space. And projects like Copenhagen Suborbital and Bitnation Space Agency are completing the evolution by relying entirely on open-source hardware, and replacing high-overhead managerial bureaucracies with peer-network governance.

Things look genuinely optimistic for the future of space exploration and human expansion into the solar system. The reason for hopefulness doesn’t lie with the state; and with luck, maybe it won’t lie with Elon Musk for much longer either.

Photo by Sweetie187

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