The single global project for the Left (protection of local interbeing, commons, oikos)

Frankly, I wouldn’t like to live in a stupid society where I would have to be all the time engaged in local, communitarian politics, and so on and so on. My idea is to live in a society where some invisible, alienated machinery takes care of things so I can do whatever I want. Watch movies, read and write philosophical books and so on... The problems we are confronting, we can list them in differing ways, but my point is they are all problems of commons. For example, ecology is clearly a problem of commons. Nature or natural environment is our commons, something that shouldn’t be privatised because it belongs to all of us. It is the background, literally the ground of our being. And it’s clear for me here we need to, erh, we need to reinvent, not local democracy but on the contrary, also large-scale solutions. The problem today is not local, not local communitarian democracy, the problem today is how [to] regulate trends worldwide. 

Slavoj Žižek: Democracy and Capitalism Are Destined to Split Up, Big Think, published on Jan 7, 2015

While Slavoj Žižek’s idea for communism is sensibly rooted in engagement with a present commons rather than dwelling in the failed communist projects of the twentieth century, his thinking here reveals deep conceits. What commons, who is labouring them, how are global human needs met without negating the call of local human and biotic others?
Žižek expresses himself with an anthropocentric-bourgeois worldview typical of many urban intellectuals – to live in a society where some invisible, alienated machinery takes care of things so I can do whatever I want. By urban here, I do not mean people who necessarily reside in cities, but rather people who are constructed or crafted by a hyper urbanised world making, or what I’ve called hypertechnocivility – human-centric institutionalism, machine dominance and extreme domestication. Within this limited place for thought there is little listening to the call of biotic others, and few lived examples of a truly shared world. World, to Žižek, must submit to the philosopher’s longings, which for him can be provided by large top-down solutions and alienated, world-destroying distribution systems to bring him his basic needs and comforts – movies and books and so forth.
Žižek’s project could be to speak of the codependency the local and global have with one another, but the local is perhaps too much too close for an ideas man. The 'local' demands relationships and listening much more than blowing ideas. With Žižek, ancestors and nonhumans are of course all relegated to the metropolis’s androgynous dump sites because alienated automation demands such consciousness. Any talk of making returns - regressions, digressions, decays and unmakings – brings scorn and accusations of noble savagery, romanticising indigeneity, pathetic fallacy, the typical attacks from urbane intellectuals on the Left and Right. In Žižek’s alienated city, wholly dependant on extraction and transporting in far away resources, no returns can be made, biophysically or culturally. Everything is a waste stream. Linear progress capitalism (free marketism) and linear progressive urbanism (identity politics) reveal a dim, almost nothing divider between Right and Left, funded by cheap crude oil, rolling out endless footpaths of domestication and monospeciesist thought. Essentially, both advance the global destruction of the planet in their very alienated linearities.
This is why Žižek gets attention. He’s good for the Right, so improbable and incoherent is his philosophy albeit clever and a novelty voice to spar with, and for the intellectual Left a relief there is a counter spokesbeing getting as much attention as Steven Pinker and other apologists for Enlightenment-triggered economic ruination of the biosphere. But really they are the same mens of their generation who lack any abiding care for the relationships required and laboured with within each local ecology. Žižek and Pinker et al are products of selfish-gene ideology, of a carbon-privileged educational training system. Ironically, the mother, mater, is null and void to such materialists. But declining oil deposits and other significant materials that have made the monster, Globalman, and which provides such grandiose illusions – bring me my movies and books, and while you pass the fridge grab me my originless, earth-destroying food – is a momentary affair with ancient sunlight and ancient bird shit. Yes, we’re also at peak phosphate rock, a critical ingredient of alienated agriculture – the brain fodder of hypertechnocivilians, Baby Boomers the first total alpha generation.
There is, however, some place of commune with Žižek in addressing privatised intransigence and exploitation of the biosphere’s innumerable commons. But contrary to Žižek’s boredom with the relational and listened-to local, the only global political project worth considering for the global Left (after it's done with its compulsive obsession with city focussed, carbon-privileged identity divisiveness) is the dismantling of the globalised destruction of local communities and environments. That is the globalised protection of infinite local environments, people and biotic others. If Žižek has a political project that addresses the problem of a systemic eradication of world commons, then there is coherence here. This inevitably must include the degrowth of money and the growth of relational economies, returning to localised gift economies between trusted kin and more formal barter with community others. Money can serve the realm of strangers and enemies, which needs to be no more than 30% of each local economy, which in turn pays for the global culture to protect from violence any local culture. This of course is the dissolution of the banks and debt-based finance.
 Until local communities – biotically diverse cultural communities – can make the call on behalf of their local biomes there will never be a proper addressing of species extinction, climate change or resource depletion, never a propper addressing of systemic pollution ideology so required for Žižek’s movies, books and alienated food and energy resources to be trucked to him from someone else’s commons.
The vast global project of local commons protection requires a rebirth of a politically loaded re-indigeneity, especially with regards to how we make economy and how we live with fellow species. This understanding is not possible as hypertechnocivilians. The global Left requires non-urbane voices to be listened to, human and biotic others, to work stridently beyond the frames and limitations of hypertechnocivility. The city universities of the world are generally too narrow in their scope to bare an intelligentsia required to mount the logic and scope of a deeply listened-to global ecosophy stating the protection of local biomes. Economy must return to a loved homeplace, replacing systemic militarised automation with biotic intimacy and the making of returns - gifts. The global project of the Left is to see to it that this is made possible. Everything after this vast project, if fulfilled, becomes a local matter – a return to relationship with each local mother.

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Can a poet speak on economy?

This week I gave a talk as part of the La Trobe University Art Forum lecture series about how my solo work found its way into the all encompassing collective practice of Artist as Family. What happens when artists cease to be co-opted by an industry enframed by the imperatives of capital and augment new economic narratives? A radical-homemaking, permacultural-neopeasantry springs forth!

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Permacultural neopeasantry and people care

 Here is my Melbourne Free University (MFU) talk, in video (audio) form:



If you're reading this in an email, you'll need to click through to see the link.

A few thoughts since I gave this talk, where I became the subject of an unproductive ambush:

While the Left attacks itself over technicalities, different lifeways and language use – the very things that herald the potential for diversity – the Right runs away with the ball, laughing hysterically all the way to the banks. How we treat one another is key to a transition from dominating power relationships that aim to hurt and divide and towards a culture of true diversity.

The most destructive part of question time in my MFU talk was the product of a few people coming to the gathering with a will-to-violence that disallowed the possibility for deep listening. This is how violence establishes itself, it feeds on reductionism.

I wrote about the project of people care in Perma/Culture: Imagining Alternatives in an Age of Crisis. My chapter is called Reclaiming accountability from hypertechnocivility, to grow again the flowering earth (you can read it below), and it outlines approaches to understanding how violence, especially in language, be it privileged or retaliatory (or somewhere on the hierarchical scale), is a force for the destruction of the other who is not living our values. The ecological ramifications for humans endlessly attacking one another are of course innumerable. Business thrives on such hatred, which in turn creates assaults on ecology because consumption often ramps up when people are unsettled, shamed, angry, desperate or self-loathing.

To include the potential of the other in one's frame is a practice of understanding through deep listening. Buddhists and others might say it's the heart where compassion resides, but it really seems apparent now that the relationship between the enteric biome (of the gut) and the cortex-limbic biomes (of the brain) are where our social selves speak and act from.

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Ruffling the feathers of KeepCup scholarship

Against ‘neo-peasantry’ and the desire for self-sufficiency, an article recently written in Overland, misses three crucial points: Neopeasantry concerns community-sufficiency, an abiding connection to ancestry, and modelling carbon positive futures. These three things have been crudely disappeared by Rachel Goldlust in this polemical writing parading as scholarship. 

Here is the reply we posted on the Overland site:

Hi Rachel, we are that family from Daylesford you mention. We would have been open to being interviewed, even a visit, it’s a pity you only refer to a new.com.au article as your main reference to us. 

In this writing you attempt to disappear our ancestors. Of course, ‘neo’ locates our ‘fessed up privilege in choosing to be peasant-like, but ‘peasant’ is our heritage, our families, our pre-industrial past prior to the enclosures and the ‘primitive accumulation’ of our ancestral lands.  

There is both an everyday intimacy and lived-politic that we’re advancing by championing this term. Our politic goes like this: If people can again have access to land they can produce alternative, land-conscious economies. They can decouple themselves from the giant wrecking ball global economy and potentially live a carbon-positive lifeway. We are modelling this politic every day. 

We don’t deny we’re on Dja Dja Wurrung country, we live that reality. We also don’t deny our own indigenous-peasant past and we draw on it to transition from what we call hypertechnocivility.  

Ultimately, we are neopeasants who apply permacultural principles to our home and community economies to further become accountable mammals of place, and this constitutes our practice of art, our culture making and our corporeal forms of feminism. 

Your article strikes us as another act of urbane violence directed at an imagined and clearly poorly understood target. We question your scholarship.

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