utopian guide
(2103) by david graeber: A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse
via simona ferlini:
We are talking about the murdering of dreams, the imposition of an apparatus of hopelessness, designed to squelch any sense of an alternative future.
https://t.co/NHbJN9ZzWk
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/sonmi451it/status/1472625910071365648
notes/quotes from article:
It’s not that revolutionary dreams aren’t out there. But contemporary revolutionaries rarely think they can bring them into being by some modern-day equivalent of storming the Bastille.
Were revolutions ever really what we thought them to be? For me, the person who has asked this most effectively is the great world historian Immanuel Wallerstein. He argues that for the last quarter millennium or so, revolutions have consisted above all of planet wide transformations of political common sense.
Revolutions are thus planetary phenomena.
well.. none to date.. so far all have been part\ial ness
But there is more. What they really do is transform basic assumptions about what politics is ultimately about. In the wake of a revolution, ideas that had been considered veritably lunatic fringe quickly become the accepted currency of debate.
if we had a legit planetary revolution.. and org around legit needs.. i don’t think we’d be spending our days debating or politic-ing..
Until 1968, most world revolutions really just *introduced practical refinements: an expanded franchise, universal primary education, the welfare state. ..rebellion against bureaucracy, conformity, or **anything that fettered the human imagination, a project for the revolutionizing of not just political or economic life, but every aspect of human existence. As a result, in most cases, the rebels didn’t even try to take over the apparatus of state; ***they saw that apparatus as itself the problem.
*still.. all still have elements of same song.. like we’re afraid to be crazy enough.. to let go enough
**i’m thinking that rebellion et al.. messes w imagination/us
***good to be going deeper.. but won’t get to the dance till we go deep enough
The ironies are endless. While the new free market ideology has framed itself above all as a rejection of bureaucracy, it has, in fact, been responsible for the first administrative system that has operated on a planetary scale, with its endless layering of public and private bureaucracies: the IMF, World Bank, WTO, trade organizations, financial institutions, transnational corporations, NGOs.
this is what rebellion, refusal, defense, etc.. all does.. just perpetuates (keeps alive) tragedy of the non common et al
It only made sense that the first attempt to recreate a global revolutionary movement, the Global Justice Movement that peaked between 1998 and 2003, was effectively a rebellion against the rule of that very planetary bureaucracy.
They considered it far more important to prevent effective opposition at home than to actually win the war. It’s as if American forces in Iraq were ultimately defeated by the ghost of Abbie Hoffman.
What happens when the creation of that sense of failure, of the complete ineffectiveness of political action against the system, becomes the chief objective of those in power?
Is it possible that this preemptive attitude toward social movements, the designing of wars and trade summits in such a way that preventing effective opposition is considered more of a priority than the success of the war or summit itself, really reflects a more general principle?
If, on the other hand, we stop taking world leaders at their word and instead think of neoliberalism as a political project, it suddenly looks spectacularly effective. . they have succeeded magnificently in convincing the world that capitalism—and not just capitalism, but exactly the financialized, semifeudal capitalism we happen to have right now—is the only viable economic system. If you think about it, this is a remarkable accomplishment.
graeber make it diff law et al
How did they pull it off? The preemptive attitude toward social movements is clearly a part of it; under no conditions can alternatives, or anyone proposing alternatives, be seen to experience success. This helps explain the almost unimaginable investment in “security systems” of one sort or another:.. t the fact that the United States, which lacks any major rival, spends more on its military and intelligence than it did during the Cold War, along with the almost dazzling accumulation of private security agencies, intelligence agencies, militarized police, guards, and mercenaries. Then there are the propaganda organs, including a massive media industry that did not even exist before the sixties, celebrating police. Mostly these systems do not so much attack dissidents directly as contribute to a pervasive climate of fear, jingoistic conformity, life insecurity, and simple despair that makes any thought of changing the world seem an idle fantasy..t Yet these security systems are also extremely expensive. .. most of this disciplinary apparatus is pure deadweight.
not just dead weight but cancer
No one has much time for political activity if they’re working sixty-hour weeks.
both (political activity and work) suffocate us.. so both perpetuate the death of us
..The combined result is a relentless campaign against the human imagination. Or, to be more precise: imagination, desire, individual creativity, all those things that were to be liberated in the last great world revolution, were to be contained strictly in the domain of consumerism, or perhaps in the virtual realities of the Internet. In all other realms they were to be strictly banished. We are talking about the murdering of dreams, the imposition of an apparatus of hopelessness, designed to squelch any sense of an alternative future. Yet as a result of putting virtually all their efforts in one political basket, we are left in the bizarre situation of watching the capitalist system crumbling before our very eyes, at just the moment everyone had finally concluded no other system would be possible.
Normally, when you challenge the conventional wisdom—that the current economic and political system is the only possible one—the first reaction you are likely to get is a demand for a detailed architectural blueprint of how an alternative system would work, down to the nature of its financial instruments, energy supplies, and policies of sewer maintenance. Next, you are likely to be asked for a detailed program of how this system will be brought into existence.. t Historically, this is ridiculous. When has social change ever happened according to someone’s blueprint? ..the idea is so absurd we might well ask ourselves how it ever occurred to us to imagine this is how change happens to begin.
graeber grant law; graeber min\max law; .. et al
This is not to say there’s anything wrong with utopian visions. Or even blueprints. They just need to be kept in their place..*We cannot really conceive of the problems that will arise when we start trying to build a free society. What now seem likely to be the thorniest problems might not be problems at all;.. t **others that never even occurred to us might prove devilishly difficult. There are innumerable X-factors.
*huge.. so let’s design for that
**i don’t think that’s so if we org around legit needs.. i think the takes a lot of work ness becomes irrelevant
This might explain, for instance, why so many of the more compelling visions of an anarchist society have been produced by science fiction writers (Ursula K. Le Guin, Starhawk, Kim Stanley Robinson). In fiction, you are at least admitting the technological aspect is guesswork.
*Myself, I am less interested in deciding what sort of economic system we should have in a free society than in creating the means by which people can make such decisions for themselves. t.. What might a revolution in common sense actually look like? I don’t know, but I can think of any number of pieces of conventional wisdom that surely need challenging if we are to create any sort of viable free society. I’ve already explored one—the nature of money and debt—in some detail in a recent book. I even suggested a debt jubilee, a general cancellation, in part just to bring home that money is really just a human product, a set of promises, that by its nature can always be renegotiated.
*huge.. conditions we need: org around legit needs
oikos (the economy our souls crave).. ‘i should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.’ – gaston bachelard, the poetics of space
perhaps let’s try/code money (any form of measuring/accounting) as the planned obsolescence w/ubi as temp placebo.. where legit needs are met w/o money.. till people forget about measuring
revolution of everyday life.. et al
What would remain is the kind of work only human beings will ever be able to do: those forms of caring and helping labor that are at the very center of the crisis that brought about Occupy Wall Street to begin with. . A renegotiated definition of productivity should make it easier to reimagine the very nature of what work is, since, among other things, it will mean that technological development will be redirected less toward creating ever more consumer products and ever more disciplined labor, and more toward eliminating those forms of labor entirely.
At the moment, probably the most pressing need is simply to slow down the engines of productivity.
actually.. i don’t think we need to do anything to slow anything down.. if we just org around legit needs
We seem to be facing two insoluble problems. On the one hand, we have witnessed an endless series of global debt crises, which have grown only more and more severe since the seventies, to the point where the overall burden of debt—sovereign, municipal, corporate, personal—is obviously unsustainable. On the other, we have an ecological crisis, a galloping process of climate change that is threatening to throw the entire planet into drought, floods, chaos, starvation, and war. The two might seem unrelated. But ultimately they are the same.
they’re the same song.. because they are symptoms of the deeper issue.. ie: 8b people w missing pieces
Why not a planetary debt cancellation, as broad as practically possible, followed by a mass reduction in working hours: a four-hour day, perhaps, or a guaranteed five-month vacation? This might not only save the planet but also (since it’s not like everyone would just be sitting around in their newfound hours of freedom) begin to change our basic conceptions of what value-creating labor might actually be.. Occupy was surely right not to make demands, but if I were to have to formulate one, that would be it.
but in the end it will just perpetuate sea world.. same song.. if we want legit diff.. if we want legit freedom.. we need to let go of any form of m\a\p and org around legit needs
It’s also why debt cancellation would make the perfect revolutionary demand.
again.. not deep enough
..if we are going to have any chance of heading off those catastrophes, we’re going to have to change our accustomed ways of thinking. .The human imagination stubbornly refuses to die. And the moment any significant number of people simultaneously shake off the shackles that have been placed on that collective imagination, even our most deeply inculcated assumptions about what is and is not politically possible have been known to crumble overnight
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revolution: instigating utopia everyday
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be you. 