I kinda buried the lede yesterday: my next book “Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in A World On Fire” is finally available for pre-order from Verso! It’s about how we organize ourselves as communities to survive the climate-systems collapse unfolding all around us, drawing on lessons from the Black Panther survival programs, Occupy Sandy and the Crisis-era Greek solidarity clinics straight through to municipalism in Spain and democratic confederalism in Rojava! https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2536-lifehouse
As a student of anarchism, most of my reading has been online or downloaded, but I've begun to get a notion that I want to start a physical library. I've pre-ordered your book as the first official addition! It will join my physical copies of "A People's History of the US", "Debt" and "Dawn of Everything".
The number of people imputing things they wanted to hear, seemingly so they could accuse you, but which you didn’t say, and/or not investing any curiosity in what you did actually point them at… was quite something.
It kind of brings home just how much is functionally invisible
>>The idea that without capitalism we will become less wasteful and more mindful of our global predicament sounds implausible to me.<<
I don't know why 🤷♂️
Unless you really just don't see how capitalism drives so much waste, depletion and destruction, or if you think capitalism is an entirely voluntary system, not coercive.
I mean look at just one tiny and very limited example and think about the potential ramifications: police defending dumpsters of expired food from being utilized by hungry people, and retailers intentionally fouling such food to prevent people from eating it. This is a very simple, direct example. Others are more deeply embedded into the way things work now; the motivations and constraints capitalism injects everywhere.
The narrative you're pushing here is that capitalism is not to blame and removing it won't change anything, but the evidence and arguments you keep presenting are all based on conditions that were created by capitalism and have to be constantly maintained through great effort and violence.
I guess we have a huge disagreement over how capitalism affects people's behavior and circumstances.
As for megafauna extinction, it is not conclusive that humans were the main driver but even if true, it is not by itself a defining picture of our species, in fact there are many counter-examples:
The USSR was state capitalism, it is not an example of another system, or of anything happening outside capitalism. Since at least the early 20th century all states have inextricably part of the global capitalist system. I recommend the book "State Capitalism: The Wages System Under New Management" by Adam Buick and John Crump https://files.libcom.org/files/State%20Capitalism.pdf
All the examples you give continue to reflect the conditions and conditioning embedded in the world-wide capitalist system, not examples of people acting outside of its influence (both material and mental).
>>Societies all around the world tried different systems and due to material pressures and historical contingencies we've arrived at this point.<<
I do not believe this narrative at all. Nobody voted for capitalism, nobody "arrived at it" after everything else failed. It did not arise spontaneously around the globe. Capitalism was violently forced upon the world, continuing on the heels of colonialism.
I absolutely reject the notion that it is a natural inevitable result of any kind of "evolution" and frankly I find no legitimate use in applying the word "evolution" beyond it's strict biological meaning. I can put up with casual usage, but not in a serious discussion when it gets used as a sort of authoritative shorthand.
>>...just like agricultural societies violently drove away hunter gatherer societies before that.<<
I suspect this may be an overly broad generalization and oversimplification.
"Actually, what happened [in the Middle East] after the invention of agriculture around 10,000 years ago, is a long period of around another 4,000 years in which villages largely remained villages.
And actually there's very little evidence for the emergence of rigid social classes, which is not to say that nothing happened.
Over those 4,000 years, technological change actually proceeded apace. Without kings, without bureaucracies, without standing armies, these early farming populations fostered the development of mathematical knowledge, advanced metallurgy. They learned to cultivate olives, vines and date palms. They invented leavened bread, beer, and they developed textile technologies: the potter's wheel, the sail. And they spread all of these innovations far and wide, from the shores of the eastern Mediterranean, up to the Black Sea, and from the Persian Gulf, all the way over to the mountains of Kurdistan..."
There are criticisms of their work, sure, there are also criticisms of those criticisms, and there are also defenders of their work.
Is there any reference from anyone that can ever be made that absolutely nobody has criticisms of?
So I reject your attempt to write them off entirely and conveniently!
I've actually still not read "Dawn of Everything" yet. If you have specific facts to counter the specific information that I was sharing from Wengrow specifically, then by all means present it.
4,000 years of history in the middle east doesn't strike me as "cherry-picking".
"total disregard for the effects of biological evolution"? Where does that come from? Specifically what biological changes are you referring to that have occurred in humans over the last 10,000 years or so?
>>The present state of global extractivism that majority of human population participates in and benefits from, I would add.<<
I'm tempted to just straight up block you for this statement because it is incredibly superficial and naive, yet you don't strike me as superficial and naive.
"capitalism has lifted billions out of poverty!!1!!" 😬
People in the imperial core are dying of heart disease linked to microplastic accumulation in their blood vessels. Climate change is a consequence that will affect everyone. Capitalism has utterly warped and damaged many people who are affluent beneficiaries.
People participate because they have no choice. Many benefits are dubious and all have costs, often not reckoned yet.
If we're all participating voluntarily and truly benefit then everything is ok, why are we even having this discussion? I get social security benefits, I have a car and a place to live, I eat cookies and drink beer, I should just STFU, what do I have to complain about?
Jack said capitalism did not have an architect, yet he continues to fall back on the carefully crafted narrative that has been developed to justify it, a narrative that goes way back to men like Hobbes and Locke and has been maintained and reinforced ever since by the status quo who find it very convenient. The tragedy of the commons is an example of this, though disproven it still carries authority and it is basically Jack's argument throughout this whole episode.
Who needs an architect when you have a triumphant and all-powerful god?
I refer to capital, and I haven't mentioned it for a while but one of my personal perspectives is that capital is like a form of AI that has been given autonomous authority over us. Hidden conspiracies, while not entirely absent are no longer necessary to drive things. Everyone is on the same page under capital, everyone knows the rules and is subject to the same demands and constraints.
These demands and constraints also serve the function of allowing our institutions and leaders to wash their hands of absolutely horrendous crimes against humanity and nature.
Ideologically driven attempts at other systems never even really tried to overthrow this god and as a result they were ideological in name only, and trying to implement these ideologies without eliminating capital only resulted in even worse atrocities.
I should add in light of the other comments re: "dialectical" that when there are conflicts now, they serve capital. Whichever side wins, capital wins.
Does it work better for you if I say I'm talking about capital as a concept that has infected our minds and social relations? A concept that does not serve us well, in fact we all serve this concept to our own detriment.
But it is not a natural concept and not one that was developed for good reasons by people of good will.
>>in a general discussion like this I would probably talk about specific things and relate them to interactions with capital.<<
The discussion had turned to the notion that capitalism is not created or maintained by an "architect", yet we know that it has some very specific and consistent characteristics and that we are all subject to them. I think our interactions with capital show that capital is power. More specifically it's a measure of social relations of power.
Individual people or institutions have power thanks to capital. But if they perish, or capital is taken from them, they no longer have that power but the capital still exists, at least in our collective records.
>>...conservative aristocrats who turned to making agricultural commodities, and hence undermined the manorial system, despite their aim simply being to maintain their power as lords of the manor.<<
We're talking about transitional times here though right? Capital predates capitalism, but it didn't rule the world yet.
Anyway, it's just an idiosyncratic perspective of mine, I don't need to put any more energy into defending it for this discussion, it's pretty tangential to it.
Jack continues to ignore power dynamics and structures.
>>We're not burning fossil fuels because we're stupid or because capitalism made us do it, but because they provide us with great benefits.<<
This completely ignores the process whereby fossil fuels became so readily available and their use so encouraged; it ignores the massive coercion that was necessary, it ignores the real motivations behind the extraction, it ignores the institutional motivations behind the fossil-dependent infrastructures we've been stuck with. It ignores the fact that states run the show, not "us".
It ignores capitalist realism and cultural hegemony.
It's that damn tragedy of the commons shit again and I reject it.
I remember being pretty young and asking my parents—is this it? We go to school every day and then we get a job and go to work every day and this is our lives, forever? Just living each day according to someone else’s schedule, at someone else’s command? This is life?
And they were pretty flummoxed. Yeah, they said, this is life. What did you expect? This is what you do and then you die.
These are the same people who showed my Koyaanisqatsi when I was like six and encouraged me to internalize its message that capitalist modernity is catastrophically, irrevocably broken and unsustainable.
And I just think…a lot of people hold pretty good beliefs in the abstract but it doesn’t occur to them to live as if they were actually true.