[PeDAGoG] [REDlistserve] A new article on the RED website - "The path to a just and sustainable society"

[Steven Johnson]

I agree, Tom, that we wouldn't want to do without the best of modern
research and technology. I would only hasten to clarify that that is NOT
Ted's position. Rather, he wants to do away with the 90% or so of
production that we don't really need to live well, that enriches
capitalists but does not really meet essential needs or truly improve our
lives, and to radically reduce consumption in the affluent countries. And
this is precisely so that we can collectively afford, resource-wise, to
preserve the most useful and essential things like medical care, and so
that the resources that capitalist profiteers and gluttonous Western
consumers are squandering can be shared equitably with the majority world
so that all may live at a sustainable and frugal but decent standard of
living.

Tom mentioned broadband Internet, and here we are, using that to hold this
conversation. I'm glad that tech is here, and those of us whose work is
information-intensive can certainly access a lot of information more
efficiently with it. I do remember life before it, though, and it honestly
wasn't that bad. In some ways I think it was better. I think a happy
median, if we re-organize society to live in the kinds of communities of
the Simpler Way vision that Ted advocates, might be for the shared space in
each community to have a few shared computers, like a library. Perhaps a
few whose occupations require it might possess a dedicated computer for
themselves, though if we want to transition to a society where manual and
intellectual labor is more equitably shared, as I think we must do if we
are to seek justice and avoid fostering a dominant managerial class,
perhaps the shared computer model, combined with democratic allocation of
the workload and associated computer access time, might be a solution that
massively reduces the total number of machines and devices that are needed,
with all of their life cycle environmental and other costs, while still
supplying communities with all of the equipment that is really needed to
supply the computer access time that is efficiently allocated to achieve
collective production goals in their democratic economic plans. Eliminating
planned obsolescence, and building each machine to last, would also be
crucial, and this would be something a socially planned economy would have
incentive to do, unlike the current system whose goal is to maximize
corporate profits. There is a question of how much of a good thing we need,
and I think the massive expansion of infrastructure associated with the
rollout of 5G that is underway is disastrous for the planet, and should be
urgently resisted. It's not really an efficient use of scarce resources and
sinks to use Internet-controlled machines to blow our noses when we can
just grab a tissue ourselves. That is hopefully a slight exaggeration of
what they have in store for us, but the logic of capital is to get us to
think we need stuff analogous to that if it will increase corporate sales.
An excellent treatment of 5G and related issues is Jorge Riechmann's
<https://www.15-15-15.org/webzine/2020/09/07/decrecer-desdigitalizar-quince-tesis/>,
in Spanish, though there are hopefully comparable materials in English. (It
has nothing to do with the wild conspiracy theories that are out there
about this topic, but takes into account real-world analysis of
ecological footprints, resource limits, and the evidence for a pending
collapse rather than ongoing expansion of industrial civilization as we
know it.)

Ted's views and mine overlap considerably, and within that overlap lie what
I think are some of the very most important tasks that we can be doing. His
emphasis is on affluent Westerners withdrawing from consumerism and
building local materially simple substantially egalitarian economies, which
I think is an essential pillar of the path we need to travel. I would add
to that, perhaps a bit more explicitly and prominently than he does (though
it is not absent from his viewpoint), another complementary emphasis, as a
twin pillar, on active practical solidarity by people in the minority
affluent countries and communities with the struggles of great masses of
already-simply-living peoples throughout the majority world to recover and
defend Indigenous territories, achieve equitable redistributive land reform
and supports for sustainable peasant producers facilitating substantial
de-urbanization and re-population of countrysides, and stop destructive
megaprojects. Ted talks of starving capitalism by withdrawing from
consumerism, but it is also essential to support the numerous environmental
struggles throughout the world (see the Environmental Justice Atlas
<https://ejatlas.org/>) which, if successful, will starve capitalism of the
unbridled resource extraction that it requires to reproduce its monstrous
self. This solidarity work involves politically pressuring and confronting,
by all ethical and effective means, capitalist governments that are aiding
and abetting corporate violence and destruction
<https://www.15-15-15.org/webzine/2020/12/06/springer-publishing-succumbs-to-legal-bullying-and-why-this-matters-in-the-struggle-for-a-sustainable-and-just-world/>
throughout the world

Though there is an important truth in it, I'm not entirely happy with the
language that Ted sometimes uses of ignoring capitalism to death, or of
rallying rebels to the community garden rather than to the barricades. I
think the path ahead will include plenty of both. Currently, life is
structured by the rule of capital in such a way that people HAVE to consume
more than is sustainable, for example, in many places they need a car to
get to work. And most people cannot afford to buy land on which to
sustainably produce for their direct consumption, but have to earn cash in
the unsustainable economy to pay rent to a landlord, etc. Middle class
people who can afford to buy land, because they either worked in the
unsustainable economy for 30 years or were given money by someone who did,
can do valuable and instructive experiments on purchased land that can help
educate the public. But even if widespread consciousness arises of the need
to return to sustainable ways of individual and communal self-provisioning
within a land base that we care for and that sustains us, it won't happen
on a large scale without land redistribution, and I don't see that being
achieved by ignoring the capitalist banks and land owning interests. It
will require great struggle, of the barricade variety.

Related to the land issue, as a recent article
<https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/15/4508/htm> from Megan Seibert and
William Rees points out, life after the age of cheap and abundant energy
will likely be a lot like life before it. And if there is anything we
should learn from the millennia of recorded history before the industrial
age, it is that environmentally destructive and socially oppressive ruling
class elites do not need modern consumer capitalism to be in place in order
to maintain their power, lay waste to the environment, and control people
and appropriate the value of their labor power, leaving them with barely
enough to survive. As commodity-based capitalism implodes due to its
environmental destruction and exhaustion of resources, it seems likely to
me that the default successor system, in the absence of extremely concerted
and energetic popular struggle, will be a morphing of the current
capitalist class rule into arrangements that resemble ancient imperial
command economies. We may eventually be able to ignore capitalists but we
will not be able to ignore their heirs who will continue to try to
violently control lands and dominate and enslave and exploit us, using
their privileged access to the declining resources that remain to do so. If
ancient aristocracies and empires could be built by the simple low-tech,
low-energy process of controlling access to granaries that could feed
soldiers and slaves, the post-capitalist elites will have more than that at
their disposal as we travel down the slope of energy availability.

What I'm hoping will be different from the past is that our struggles to
defeat capitalism and prevent the rise of a successor form of class
domination will be starting from a point, unique in history, when it is
possible for there to be global concerted action by Indigenous peoples,
peasants, and the popular classes, simultaneously and everywhere, against
hierarchical and exploitative class rule. Marxists have thought that the
factor that would make popular struggles enduringly succeed today though
they failed, or only achieved partial or temporary victories in the past,
is the emergence of industrialism and the proletariat. I think that is a
mistake. I think that the limiting factors in the past were, generally
speaking, not technological but relational, though I do think that the
technology of global communications (though we need to scale it down) could
make a decisive difference. The primary unique hopeful factor of our time,
I think, is the fact that, while capitalist domination is global, so is
resistance to it. When thinking of the Paris Commune, or the Huasteca
peasant rebellions in Mexico in the 19th C., the river irrigation sharing
systems of what is now called the American Southwest, or any number of
other similar popular struggles or cooperative models of the past, sooner
or later, after the people had won control of territories or established
cooperative arrangements and a degree of autonomy for some time, the ruling
elites were always able to muster superior forces from outside to come and
annihilate the rebels. Struggles in the future will be no picnic, but what
is different about today is that there is now no more "outside" from which
to invade, which means that, though victories will be hard to achieve, once
enough victories are won, it may be possible to consolidate them over time,
so that victories come to outnumber defeats rather than the reverse,
popular power grows more enduringly, and the power of elites declines
rather than ascends. That is to say, while it will be essential and not
easy to maintain sufficient unified vision and resolve, we may be at a
point in a cycle of thousands of years of history where we are about to get
over a hump, after which further progress may be achieved along a somewhat
easier downhill rather than uphill path. Time is of the essence if we are
to get to that point while still having much of a world left that can be
restored to support a decent future for our progeny and their nonhuman
neighbors in the web of life.

I have not finished reading all the posts in this thread, but I love how
the contributions I have read so far give reminders of crucial elements and
dimensions that we need to continually keep in mind and attend to. Besides
Ted's worthwhile article, Ariel Salleh called attention to the patriarchal
dimension of our history and struggles and, while understandings of that
are not sufficiently woven through my thinking and practice, since male
voices have dominated discussions and this dimension isn't focused on
enough, I'm hoping we can all put forth requisite efforts and make
collective progress to correct these deficiencies. David Barkin mentioned
organizations and movements that relate to matters at the heart of my
personal involvements and concerns and that I will be eager to follow up on
and research further. I'm very glad this forum and community exists.

Steven Johnson

On Wed, Sep 29, 2021 at 9:15 AM Tom Abeles <tabeles at gmail.com> wrote:

> I would be concerned, living in such a world, if I needed life-saving
> medical services from vaccines to heart surgery. Similarly, I would be
> concerned without universities, research and technology which has given us
> solar panels, broadband internet and similar which is imbedded in much of
> what we use on a daily basis. The Buddhist Gross Happiness Index ponders
> these issues.
>
> On Tue, Sep 28, 2021 at 7:20 PM Ariel Salleh <arielsalleh7 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Nice point Carlos.
>> Considering how states are historically sex-gendered institutions may
>> offer a way forward that mediates yours and Ted’s position …?
>> Ariel
>>
>>
>>
>> On 28 Sep 2021, at 6:58 am, Carlos Tornel <tornelc at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi all and thanks Pallav for sharing this article!
>>
>> I'm relatively new on some of the lists, but I thought I could share some
>> thoughts after the reading.
>>
>> I found the article quite useful for thinking about how we can start to
>> build a post (growth, capitalism, extractive, etc.) society. I have faced
>> similar questions and concerns when advocating for a convivial or a
>> communal society in different spaces, such as what do we do with state
>> power? With armies, the military, nuclear weapons, etc.? How do we move
>> away from the Hobbian reality of power and the state? Several of the
>> anarchist and degrowth proponentes (although not so many have looked
>> seriously at this link until recently) have formulated proposals against
>> this, i.e. try to reduce our dependence on the state and progressively move
>> away from it. However this brings back the debate we've been having for
>> some time now in Latin America, should we seek to take back the state or
>> not? My own opinion is that we should, through several of the proposals
>> presented in the article, such as food and energy sovereignty, we can
>> progressively start to move away from the state, leading towards more
>> convivial societies. However it does seem that the state will have to play
>> a part in this transition, so perhaps we need to think of the transition
>> from one society to another in different scales and with different
>> agencies: I.e. What should we ask from the state? What can we do ourselves
>> in local and communal terms and how can we continue to build networks of
>> solidarity or communitarian entanglements at the regional, and even global
>> level.
>>
>> My thanks again Pallav for sharing and to Ted for a very insightful and
>> useful analysis.
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Carlos
>>
>> El sáb, 25 sept 2021 a las 5:06, Pallav Das (<dpallav at gmail.com>)
>> escribió:
>> The "eco-anarchist" transition strategy relies on “prefiguring” the new
>> social forms in the existing society. The most effective way to get people
>> to see the sense and the merits of the new ways is to establish as many
>> examples of them as possible here and now. This approach minimizes the
>> chances of violent conflict; if we persuade large numbers to the
>> alternative then radical change in structures might be brought about
>> peacefully.
>>
>>
>>
>> Friends,
>>
>> A new article, "The path to a just and sustainable society" has been
>> uploaded to the "Radical Ecological Democracy" website. In the second part
>> of his discussion on “Eco-anarchism”, Ted Trainer lays out the core
>> characteristics of a post consumer capitalist society, operating on the
>> principles of “The Simpler Way”.  Please share the article with your
>> networks and join the discussion on REDlistserv. The author is copied here
>> in case you would like to contact him directly.
>>
>>
>> https://www.radicalecologicaldemocracy.org/the-path-to-a-just-and-sustainable-society/
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Pallav
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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