Re-civ not un-civ

Posted on 05.05.2015 by Petros — Leave a comment

(sligtly edited post on certain email list)

The world is a teamwork. While I fully agree and share your frustration about people who do not really address core problems (humanity’s extractionst attitude towards nature), they are still doing pretty good job, addressing technicalities. What I learned while working with hackers is that if you are able to filter out one’s simplistic political concepts and focus on technical solutions, you are rewarded with a wealth of resources and ideas that still can be used or adopted.

Challenging basic social and political paradigms we were raised within is probably the hardest thing in one’s life. People who are bright and empathetic enough to see certain wrongness around them, but too involved to trash their comfort zone and turn street warriors are still closer to us than to our enemies. And they contribute.

I hope we share the opinion that climate change has political roots and the solution has to be political as well.

We have all technologies already in place. We know that the cost of implementing them is mainly political — lowering the standard of living for those already privileged. We know that the accounting system, showing immense costs and losses associated with the civilization change is using imaginary money and is rigged from the very beginning — so there is no problem to re-rig it for our purpose.

We know that people who own power (in every meaning of this verb) do not really care about the world, as long as they have technocrats to provide safe enclaves for them and their minions.
No amount of technology, no amount of reasoning may change — en masse — the minds of rulers. Only a real threat, a threat they cannot remove by ways of social engineering nor by sheer force — privately or through the state structures — may change their behavior.

In popular thinking such challenge is depicted as a massive riot — something Baltimore-like, only at a scale impossible to manage. That is certainly a way. But not my favourite one.

If we really want to challenge our rulers in a peaceful way, we have some very good examples to follow. From the Diggers (English and Californian ones), through Czechoslovakian idea of Parallel Polis, to contemporary praxis of EZLN and Rojava. By creating vernacular political spaces, by linking them to get synergy and self-defence capability, by proving that the change of civilisation course is possible, we can falsify the fundamental lie of our rulers: “There is no alternative”. And then we may trigger wide movement to put pressure on them. No riots are needed (at least until the adversaries resolve to use the violence).

This is the real challenge for the people who keep pondering over imminent doom of THE civilisation: to accept the fact it is the doom of A civilisation — and we are able to make another. So, re-civ, not un-civ; re-growth, not de-growth.

During the Hamburg conference, Havin Guneser, telling us about Rojava ideology, said:

We need to return the moral and political aspects back to the
society. Intellectualism has been restricted mostly to the
universities; it needs to be returned to all of us. Morals has been
replaced by positive law. Politics on the other hand has been brought
to an almost stand-still under the administration of nation-state
bureaucracy underneath the disguise of parliamentarism.

Thus, in order to be able to stop the perpetuation of capital and
power accumulation as well as the reproduction of hierarchy there is
a need to create structures of democratic confederalism―that is a
democratic, ecological and gender-liberated society.

And the best part of it is: we have all tools at hand. It is just the political will what we need to do it. It is just a contribution from alternative technology freaks. It is just what Buckminster Fuller recommended:

You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model
obsolete

This is what all our ideological ancestors tried to do. And if we want to leave anything for generations to come (yes, I know, we shall be extinct in 30 years, thank you for cheering me up), we shall follow their path. Led only by hope, as John Holloway said in Hamburg:

We do not know. We know that the first approach (the apparently
realistic one) does not work, but that does not mean that the second
approach does work. We know too that the second approach is
inevitably contradictory, that there is no purity here. We fight by
weaving a different world, in many different ways. These are weavings
that are taking place in all the world, weavings that are constantly
threatened by capital, frequently crushed by capital, constantly
taken up again by us. The weaving in this AudiMax [auditorium] over
the last three days is one small, but I hope significant example.
There is no model, there are no rules as to how it should be done.
But there are outstanding examples, examples that light up the dark,
depressing sky, examples that inspire us with their strength and
beauty. The Zapatista struggle is one glorious example of this. The
Kurdish struggle, with all its creative beauty that we have been
hearing about, is another.

The world is a teamwork. Let’s get to it.

Links
English Diggers:
http://bcw-project.org/church-and-state/sects-and-factions/diggers

San Francisco Diggers:
http://www.diggers.org/

Parallel Polis: