(2018-01-02) P2p Foundation Fully Automated Green Communism

P2P Foundation on Fully Automated Green Communism. Aaron Bastani has written a fantastic, concise analysis of the current political economy vis a vis environmental realities. While I agree that we need attractive visions of the future (see our recent Commons Transition Primer for ours) and that, yes, States and unions are key components for any realist, short-term change, I found the article’s undertones to be too growth-oriented and vanguardist – the Commons or community-led change are sadly absent. Furthermore, populism assumes a dumbed down electorate, rather than an enabled, politicised one.

increased public awareness over the last quarter of a century has failed to translate into meaningful action

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 togethe

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.