michel on emancipatory strategy ness
michel bauwens on emancipatory strategy ness
via michel tweet [https://x.com/mbauwens/status/2112773839503667506?s=20]:
I’m going to dissent from @omniharmonic brilliant historical article, not on his historical interpretations, but on what it means for current emancipatory strategy:
(read it here first: https://omniharmonic.substack.com/p/the-law-of-the-land/comments)
Here is my reply:
Brilliant article, but I do have some fundamental issues with this. It is as if history starts with colonialism. But it didn’t: *violence is inherent to the human condition, and did not even start with class-based civilizational models. **We now know that tribal societies were more violent and had more deaths through violence, than state-based societies. Literally every land in the world, was occupied by external forces, who fought each other ferociously to conquer and stay where they were. ***It also instaures a collective guilt, for example of the fiercely exploited working classes, and the populations that fled the violence and poverty of the European continent. ****But the more fundamental issue is this: you will never convince vast majorities of people to sacrifice their own present and futures, for the benefit of small, and especially, weaker minorities. This is not to say, of course, that *****a lot can be done now, to rectify past injusticies, but as a political strategy, it will never work for the slightest, and is therefore, highly counterproductive. Religious Jewish people make the claim that their historical presence on the land justifies a reclaiming 2,000 years later, and Europe has been settled in succession by pre-Celtic people, Celtic people, Germanic, Gallo-Roman, etc … Who can make a ‘ideal’ claim to this land. This path is not going into any productive direction, but will not even gain much traction in the countries driven by Anglo-Saxon colonial guilt. Again, ******nothing precludes anyone to strive to more justice vis a vis indigenous people, but it can’t be framed as an absolute emancipatory strategy.
*well.. inherent in whales.. ever since that day.. but not in legit free people.. however.. this belief is what is keeping us from trying/seeing/being that.. and oddly enough.. we seem to think we ourselves – and perhaps a few others.. aren’t ‘inherently violent’.. otherwise we would have no trace of us & them (aka: violence) ness in our history ness
**yep.. khan filling the gaps law.. ever since that day.. but not an ie of legit free people.. ie: myth of normal et al..
***all the anger ness.. from knowing in our heart/soul.. none of this is right/legit/natural/us.. again.. khan filling the gaps law.. ever since that day..
****good thing an unjustifiable strategy (aka: a nother way) doesn’t need convincing (as if that could work anyway.. ie: graeber model law et al).. it just needs the conditions for all of us to be legit free/us
*****cancerous distraction.. any form of re ness just perpetuates the same song.. the whac-a-mole-ing ness of sea world.. of not-us ness.. of part\ial ness.. perpetuating survival triage.. for (blank)’s sake..
******rather.. exactly why we need an unjustifiable strategy (aka: a nother way) that doesn’t need convincing .. because it’s something every heart/soul already craves..
so.. what we need 1st/most: a means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo our hierarchical listening/being/fighting/whatever – so we can hear what’s already on each heart as global detox in order to org around legit needs (conditions for legit ’emancipatory’ ness)
notes/quotes from substack benjamin life‘s substack (yeah.. i didn’t read it first) – the above links to michel’s reply .. this is just the post link [https://omniharmonic.substack.com/p/the-law-of-the-land]:
The Law of the Land – On the politics of land and legitimacy – oct 2026
ok.. actually skimming most of it
Both reflexes in that room, the impulse to refound and the impulse to reject, are responses to the same underlying fact: the institutions we live inside, our government and our corporations alike, rest on a founding that fails its own stated standards of legitimacy, and fails them not vaguely but specifically, in ways you can read about on Wikipedia. The younger generation takes that fact seriously enough to reject the premise of America entirely. But I don’t think you can just walk away from a broken social contract. I don’t believe there is anywhere to walk away to. Our embeddedness requires that we renegotiate it, together, this time with everyone who was left out of the original contract we inherited.
yeah (to michel i think).. this is a cancerous distraction to the dance we now have the means to dance – (note: warning ness)
I want to make that case in three moves. First, to show the illegitimacy concretely: in the law, in the economy, and in the environmental *politics we’ve inherited. Second, to describe what I’m calling bioregional political consciousness, the moment a scattered set of practices recognizes itself as a politics. And third, to **sketch a path that is neither secession nor reform: a refounding rooted in consent, one that reaches back to the parts of the original American inheritance the founders deliberately left out.
*ever since that day
**if still consent ness.. still same song.. aka: not reaching back far enough to get to legit original ness..
findings (aka: the things i can’t unsee) from on the ground ness deep dive and why we need tech w/o judgment
ie: the dance won’t dance unless/until it’s 1\ all of us 2\ legit free
no us & them et al
nothing to date (ever since that day) has gotten to that root of problem
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do
I want to do this without condemnation. Our history simply was as violent and oppressive and dehumanizing as it was. People made choices inside the cosmologies and incentives *available to them, and many of those choices were monstrous. But **the monstrousness is not the end of the story. It has to be the beginning of a new one. We cannot heal a wound we refuse to look at, and we cannot renegotiate a contract we still accept as the status quo.
**we won’t legit ‘heal‘ (almaas holes law et al) if we keep ‘looking at wounds’ ‘renegotiating contracts’.. et al..
I am not saying the people who built this country were uniquely evil, or that those of us who inherited it are guilty in some way we can pay off. That history simply was the grotesque and beautiful and grinding reality that it was. We are all its inheritors. We have all been diminished by these systems, and we have all benefited from them, some of us far more than others, in ways both obvious and nuanced. Colonization was a wound, first to the people and places it devoured, and also, in a subtler way, to the colonizers themselves, who had to sever something in themselves to do what they did. The institutions that grew from that wound are its scar tissue: thick, inflexible, numb in the places where feeling should be. You don’t heal a wound by amputating the limb. You heal it by attending to it, cleaning it, reopening what closed wrong, and letting it knit back together in right relationship.
rather.. more like tech as softwave ness.. as a means to re\set us.. because all of our ‘attending to’ ness is just perpetuating survival triage.. for (blank)’s sake..
note: on survival ness: survival is a means to survive things as they are.. so to me.. not a legit alt.. it’s triage.. perpetuating survival triage.. so a temp band aide per se.. that will /can help now.. but only for short term.. because it still doesn’t get to the root of the problem.. so it won’t offer/lead-to legit change/life/freedom.. et al.. so.. to me.. it’s still a cancerous distraction to the dance
That is the work, I think, that Herman was pointing toward. Not nostalgia for a founding, and not flight from one, but the long overdue act of *founding together, by consent, for the first time. The Catholic Church, in many ways the original legal authority that legitimized the process of colonial violence and wealth consolidation, has, since rescinding the Doctrine of Discovery, offered an alternative teaching: Laudato si’, Pope Francis’ second papal encyclical, subtitled “On Care for Our Common Home,” published on May 24, 2015, argues that environmental degradation cannot be separated from social and economic justice; famously linking “the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.” In my heart of hearts, I hold the vision that **Pope Francis, and now Pope Leo in the Age of AI, have begun to undo the spells of modernity that turned the commons into a store house of accumulated rape and extraction. If indeed that process is underway in the hidden, unseen realms of the Earth’s own evolutionary processes, then the same transformation would need to now occur within the state and the corporation.
*if still ‘consenting’ still not the unconditional conditions for legit free people
the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
[‘in an undisturbed ecosystem ..the individual left to its own devices.. serves the whole’ –dana meadows]
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance
ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition
**still a cancerous distraction to the dance
Towards the truth and reconciliation such a renewal would require, I’ve built a small tool called Living Law, Living Land (landback.land): an interactive map of the treaties the United States made with indigenous nations, where they were signed, what they promised, how and when they were broken, the court cases that ratified the breaking, and the Land Back organizations working right now to repair it. It is meant to make the contract readable, and to route attention and resources to the people doing the repair. If this essay moved something in you, I’d ask you to take a moment to be with the broken treaty for the ground under your feet and make a donation to an indigenous land back organization working to heal the still-open wounds of broken promises.
yeah (again to michel i think) .. this is just same song
Herman asked whether we should refound the United States. I’ve come to think the honest answer is that we *never founded it, not together, not by consent. Maybe what comes out the other side of that founding won’t be called the United States at all. Maybe it will be many small republics of watershed and kin, nested and federated and accountable to the generations who will inherit them. I don’t know its name yet. **None of us gets to name it alone.
*still a cancerous distraction to the dance
**we need to let go. of thinking we need to naming the colour things.. that we need to consent things..
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