the overextended memotype

NB: This is an updated version of an old article titled ‘it ain’t easy being green’.

Introduction
Few people now deny that many of the essential natural systems that sustain all life on Earth are profoundly threatened by human activity. Among countless other horrors, vast expanses of richly biodiverse rainforest have been decimated to make way for crops planted for livestock feed and biofuel, the use of fossil fuels is at an all time high, the world’s oceans are fast being depleted of fish, water shortages are imminent in many parts of the world, the global food supply is threatened by GMOs and the atmosphere itself is thick with pollutants, affecting the climactic stability of our entire planet.

Even if we ignore the troubling fact that some ecologists are calling this intersection of catastrophes the Sixth Great Extinction Crisis, the effects on just our species are alarming, and include global political instability and conflict, displacement, famine, an increase in exploitation in so-called ‘developing’ countries, epidemic levels of psychological illness and vast economic inequalities.

It is no exaggeration to say that the next decade will offer humanity both its greatest opportunity and its greatest challenge; how we choose to respond as a global community to these and other pressing issues will have immense consequences for our shared future and what kinds of lives – if any – we are able to lead on this planet. In the face of all this, however, it seems as though our defining moment of global solidarity currently amounts to little more than ineffective posturing.

We all care about these issues. We all want to do something to slow down the ecological crisis and we’ve all – those of us who are privileged enough to be able to – tried hard to make at least some of the changes advocated by mainstream environmentalists: we’ve installed low wattage lightbulbs in our homes, we buy less plastic bags, we try to eat ‘organic’, we recycle, and some of us have even sought out fuel efficient cars.

Should we then feel guilty when we’re told that, collectively, these measures will not make a substantial impact, not even if every last one of us drove a Prius and had a solar geyser?

The problem is threefold: first, capitalists have seen a new gap in the market and have attached all sorts of dubious green rhetoric, aka ‘greenwash’ to their products; second, most of the spokespeople for green ‘activism’ are married to the idea that market forces alone will suffice to save us, strengthening the drive of the green marketers and illegitimating any more radical actions; third, some of our habits are so deeply entrenched that few have actually realised that they can and should be changed. All these factors combine to give us an entirely false sense of how we can really make a difference.

So what can we do if we are serious about living ethically and reversing the tide of ecological devastation? The environmental movement has several different answers to this question.

Light Green Environmentalism
So-called ‘light green environmentalists’ (‘LG’s’ for short) see environmental protection as a personal consumer responsibility and thus ask us to simply make responsible consumption choices.

For instance, given the fact that the global livestock industry is the single largest cause of human-made global warming (more significant than the entire global transport industry according to the 2006 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation report ‘Livestock’s Long Shadow’), the LG’s advocate a shift away from an animal product based diet and towards locally produced, organic / permacultural production of plant-based foods. According to the UN and similar institutions, the global move towards a plant-based diet could result in as much as a 90% reduction in our food production footprint and would reduce our ecological footprint even more than giving up our cars for bicycles.

LG’s also advise us to use our consumer power to boycott environmentally irresponsible companies, to support mainstream environmental organisations, to participate in a ‘politics of demand’ via petitions and protests and to preference local or ‘eco-friendly’ industries whenever possible. In many ways, however, the LG movement is nothing more than a legitimation of the very same economic and political structures that got us into this mess in the first place and their proposals for change often amount to a belief in the idea that we can solve problems with the same kind of thinking that caused the problems – that we can solve carbon emission problems, for example, by allowing market trades of ‘pollution credits’.

Bright Green Environmentalism
Going one step further, BG’s ask how we produce. They tend to be enthusiastic about renewable energy, hybrid cars, nanotechnology and other ‘small footprint’ technologies. More often than not, this results in misplaced exuberance and the fetishisation of novelty for its own sake. In BG melting pots, the popular ‘TED Talks’, for instance, one encounters this regularly: machines that are connected to livestock in order to capture their methane emissions for use as clean energy is just one of the countless hare-brained schemes enthusiastically promoted by TED speakers.

While BG’s assert that technological innovation will allow us slow or even reverse the tide of ecological devastation, in practice this usually amounts to the kind of anachronistic belief in ‘the future’ that characterised such moments in our naively technotopic past as the 1939 World’s Fair or the Italian Futurist Movement (whose 1910 manifesto on the future is well worth reading as a symptomatology of terminal Enlightenment humanist faith in the myth of progress if nothing else). The aesthetics of this ‘retro-futurism’ are also core to BG’s: permaculture, for example, is not deemed as ‘sexy’ as massive vertical farming projects and natural building methods are pushed to the side as old fashioned, in favour of ’60s sci-fi style curved white buildings or mass-produced geodesic domes.

Dark Green Environmentalism
DG’s take both the LG and the BG positions one step further by questioning why consumerism has so fully permeated our lives and our values. In doing so they pose a challenge to two forms of irrational faith: the belief in the ability of ‘consumer’ activism to create market ‘solutions’ and the even more problematic belief in in the ability of ‘science’ to produce innovative solutions to any and all problems we encounter along the way.

DG’s believe that ecological devastation is being caused not just by what we buy and how it is made, but also by how we live and function as a society. They see the dominant political and economic ideology of globalised (post-)industrial capitalism as inherently flawed in its promotion of shallow and unsustainable relations with each other and the natural world, relations based on acquisitiveness, competition, mindless consumerism, homogeneity and reductionist atomization.

Not content to leave the analysis there, DG’s go on to state that the basis of all this is a misplaced emphasis on perpetual growth and progress at the expense of all else; the roots of this transcend market logic and also the development-centrism of a great deal of Leftist thought, and are in esssence simply a continuation of the myopic Industrial Revolution mindset that seeks to endlessly exploit the whole of nature for human benefit without recognising the unsustainability and arbitrariness of this approach.

Distinct from both LG’s and BG’s, DG’s encourage social activism and direct action – DG’s like philosopher and activist Dr Steven Best and writer and ecologist Derrick Jensen eloquently defend the use of any and all effective tactics in working towards ecological justice, including illegal activities like sabotaging logging operations, burning down Monsanto research laboratories or sinking whaling ships. While these are often described by mainstream media as  ‘extremist’ or ‘terroristic’ forms of action, Dr Best’s recent anthology ‘Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth’ asks us to consider them in their full context, comparing the environmental struggle to historical justice movements and supplying countless historical examples of where revolutionary direct action proved effective once  reformist ‘light green’ measures had failed.

Even Darker Green Environmentalism
At the most extreme end of the DG spectrum is the ‘primitivist’ or ‘post-civ’ movement, the most recent outgrowth of which is the UK-based Dark Mountain Project, a group working towards the complete abolition of industrial society and the creation of grassroots alternatives. While there is penchant for the hyperbolic in their publications (their 2009 manifesto being a case in point), and while ‘primitivism’ is sometimes rightly seen as an escapist approach to the problems we face as a technologically enmeshed society, it is worth pausing for a moment to reflect on what exactly it is that we do want and what really does make us truly happy before we dismiss the idea of living more simply – or in more ‘primitive’ fashion – as absurd right off the bat.

After all, psychology tells us us that for all our flashy gadgets and cheap sweatshop clothes we’re no happier now than we were several decades ago; on the contrary, we’re becoming more anxious, more depressed, more self-absorbed and less capable of meaningful and fulfilling interpersonal relationships. And surely even those of us who are relatively ‘successful’ in our forced participation in the capitalist economy must resent the mundane and often meaningless slog of our five days of ‘immaterial labour’ a week, the long and congested daily commutes in our lonely cars, the mad rush to gorge ourselves on shiny but ultimately unsatisfying trinkets and the mediation of our interpersonal relations by impersonal mass communications technologies…

…instead we enjoy, almost every single one of us, leisurely time spent with family and friends, long walks through green expanse where we can marvel at the majesty and complexity of the natural world and simple time spent engaging our creative impulses – not as a means to some fiscal end but as an entirely satisfying ends in itself. These truly basic, really meaningful parts of human experience are not enabled by technological advancement – they are mediated, debased, virtualised, distanced and increasingly unequally apportioned by it, while the very social and material bases necessary for exploring and expanding on them are progressively destroyed.

Conclusion
So even though we have sent camera equipment to Mars and now know enough about the quantum world to build a simple calculator out of a glass of water, even if we have almost perfected the artificial eye and the bionic heart, and although we can now buy (if the unequal distribution of the world’s ‘resources’ is biased in our favour) high-definition 3D televisions, portable music players that hold a hundred thousand songs and touchscreen phones that recognise spoken commands, perhaps we have forgotten, in our mad rush towards some fictitious goal post, how to ask some very simple questions:

What is an individual human life and what is life together? What could living consist of? How do we define ourselves as a species and how do we measure our worth? Is this really the best it could be? Are we acting in the interests of ourselves and the planet? What is the value, intrinsic or otherwise, of the dwindling numbers of other species we share it with? What is it that drives all of us to act in such facile and self-destructive ways? Can this be changed? Will our strategies for change truly replace these failing systems, or will they instead merely serve to reproduce them?

Maybe, just maybe, if enough of us are brave enough to confront these kinds of questions honestly and with all of our being, without simply invoking our political or philosophical biases, the very shifts in living brought about in the pursuit of finding new answers will suffice to begin the long and uncertain process of change and move us a little closer towards saving not only ourselves but also, and perhaps just as importantly, all the other life on Earth that we have disempowered, artificially divided and claimed dominion over.

Until then, the old adage is surely true: our reach exceeds our grasp.

Biography
Aragorn Eloff is an independent anarchist researcher, a long-time animal rights activist and a passionate environmentalist. He is currently completing a documentary on the global history and ideas of anarchism and in his spare time distributes radical literature via the Missing Shelf.

What is the crime of looting a corporate chain store next to the crime of owning one? - Luther Brecht

The sheer volume of commentary from across the political spectrum has made it hard to keep up with, and even harder to know where to stand on, the widespread riots that have set fire to London.

To dismiss them as the result of mere loutishness, however, or as the opportunistic violence of an undisciplined and lazy handout generation, is to entirely mistake the symptoms for the cause.

Instead, as conservatives continue to call for a heavy-handed police response, and privilege-blinded middle-classers leap into the fray to denounce the yobs for not using the ‘legitimate’ channels of democracy to air their grievances, it’s worth stepping back a little and considering some of the underlying factors that have led to a mass insurrection triggered by frustration and anomie brought about by ever-widening structural inequalities.

In order fathom the depths of this inequality we need to remind ourselves that while the chaotic nature and sheer scale of current events is unprecedented in recent British history, this is by no means an isolated moment of dissent: there have been countless student protests and university occupations over the last couple of years, as well as several large-scale strikes and marches; at the same time, draconian policing tactics and hyper-securitization have led to a growth in state-sanctioned violence against protestors and also, often ‘pre-emptively’, against the perennial scapegoats of the poor, immigrants and people of colour.

This rising tension is primarily a reaction to the impact of the global economic crisis on the UK, the effects of which have been described in quite visceral terms by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) as ‘a decade of pain’ for the average British citizen. As David McNally notes in his recent book, ‘Global Slump’, the austerity measures fomented as a response the crisis, measures that include increased taxes, decreased social spending and drastically increased university fees – and that resemble nothing so much as the neo-colonialist structural adjustment programs imposed on developing countries by global financial institutions over the last fifteen or so years – have served to exacerbate the class divide and the concomitant experiences of despair, frustration and resentment, even as the Tories revel in dismantling of the last remnants of the welfare state.

To deny this class character, as some conservative tabloids have, in a country with worse social mobility than any other developed nation, where the gap between rich and poor is so extreme that Professor Danny Dorling of the University of Sheffield, in his book ‘Injustice: Why Social Inequality Persists’, has likened it to the Indian caste system (not too far-fetched an analogy when you consider, for instance, that the richest 10% of Londoners now have an average wealth 273 times greater than that of the lowest 10%), is completely disingenuous. As Dorling says, “we are getting wealth inequalities in London now that have not been seen since the days of a slave-owning elite.”

How does it feel to be a member of this spat upon and derided lower economic caste, a caste primarily represented, unsurprisingly, in riot hotspots like Hackney and Tottenham? What is it like to grow up in the brutal conditions of council estate life, surrounded by deprivation, hopelessness, violence and crime; to see all around you, in the faces of family, neighbours and peers, a reminder of the cold, hard truth that you will, in all likelihood, never get any further than this. That realistically, regardless of how hard you work at your soul-destroying, mindless, dead-end factory job (if you’re lucky enough to find a job when there’s only one vacancy for every 54 people seeking work in your borough and when Cameron and his predecessors have been trying their best to export the remaining working class jobs), you are resigned to spend your life in a kind of empty neo-serfdom, albeit one with the dulling distractions of smartphones and Playstations and narcotics and the senseless violence of area code gangs.

And what is it like to be simultaneously bombarded with constant advertising that feeds on your alienation and lack of real community by encouraging you to seek identity in consumer items that you cannot access, but are shamed for not having. Does this create mere frustration, this double bind of can’t afford to have, can’t be seen not to have, or does it drive people, entire communities, insane? Perhaps there’s something almost poetic in the fact that most of the looters have note been taking essentials or expensive luxury items, but the very same consumer items they’ve have been instructed to desire.

More plainly, as one youth worker explained to a reporter, “youths are frustrated, they want all the nice clothes. They ain’t got no money, they don’t have jobs”.

Couple this with the growing police harassment, the shutting down of social services (including, in areas like Hackney, the sacking of support workers meant to help rehabilitate angry youth), rising rent and gentrification and an ideologically bankrupt – in many cases just plain bankrupt – economic system that rewards only the most avaricious, competitive individualism and nobody should still be surprised that a generation borne of futility and resentment, wholly unheard and bereft of any sense of consequence or accountability, has seized upon an opportunity to reclaim some small and fleeting handful of power.

“A political establishment, a media, and a state system that gives people…the impression that they won’t be listened to, unless they force themselves onto your attention, is going to lead to riots.” – Richard Seymour

In all this, and although it’s probably too soon for anything more than hyperbole, we should not be too quick to characterise the unfolding events as senseless collective rage; although there is no clear direction to the riots, and although the looting and destruction is by no means limited to symbols of corporate hegemony (although the number of small, independent shops and individuals negatively affected appears to have been overinflated by the press), there are some striking examples of class solidarity that should give us pause for reflection. Young gang members, for instance, have been crossing into the territories of other gangs without the usual ensuant turf-conflict; the category of ‘rioter’ has, for a brief moment, rendered these artificial borders more permeable.

Soon, whether via water cannon and rubber bullets and police batons or just through resignation and boredom and satiation, these borders will return, the media will lose interest and the public will avert its gaze, but nothing will be the way it was. The caste of the economically marginalised, the desperate and the systematically ignored has found its most powerful and even eloquent voice in baseball bats and shattered glass and burning police cars and, with no other options open to it, it is only a matter of time before Hackney erupts again, or before we realise that Hackney is everywhere.

If we accept that this will happen again, that it is going to happen more regularly and in complete defiance of the severity of the State’s response, then perhaps we can begin to reflect on the fact that these fundamental divides, these growing inequalities, cannot be mediated out of existence through governmental reforms or through the amelioration of capitalism’s very worst ills: at their very core, these systems inexorably cultivate these conditions. They reward those individuals and corporate entities who are the worst among us, those who already hold the most power and authority, who are, a thousand times over, the most anti-social, the most destructive, the most violent.

How we resist all this, how we channel all the bitter rage into meaningful and lasting social change, is an open question. In providing only the most tentative of answers, perhaps a musical analogy is in order: while the soundtrack to the current riots is, undoubtedly, The Sex Pistols’ ‘Anarchy in the UK’, we can find a more useful suggestion in ‘Rise’, one of John Lydon’s later songs: anger is an energy.

How this energy manifests is, in no small part, up to each one of us.

I heard it yet again the other day: ‘if you’re not a socialist by age 19, you have no heart. If you’re not a capitalist by age 29, you have no brain.’

What fascinates me about this ‘truism’ – and those who spout it – is its sense of utter resignation. Not only are we to regard as peripheral or jejune all the impulses, desires and preferences deemed valuable through their association with the heart, the implication is also that we’re supposed to accept that there is indeed no alternative – that the ‘right’ life consists of a single predetermined trajectory from the youthful sentimentalist folly of socialism to adult capitalist rationalism.

This uncritical position has been internalised not just by individuals approaching their 30′s, but also by so-called ‘oppositional’ groups like Greenpeace and the WWF, originally set up to challenge the hegemonic ravages of capitalism; they have now accepted the ‘only game in town’ hypothesis, tempering their activism until it amounts to little more than a PR campaign for big business.

There is a profound tension here: capitalism (relatively unrestrained market forces, if you prefer) sells itself as the most flexible, effective way to obtain all that we can possibly imagine, beyond any arbitrary limitations imposed by the specificities of time or place…and yet the logic of the market simultaneously permeates everything, until it becomes a kind of view from nowhere, the only way for us to relate to each other and participate in the social and material worlds. The inimitable Deleuze and Guattari say it best in their ‘A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’: capitalism deterritorializes all flows; it allows the exchange of anything and everything to flow freely across the surface of the earth while shunning any traditions, codes or laws that might limit this flow. In doing this, however, a capitalist axiomatic takes hold of and subsumes all our interactions until it seems as though there is no outside to capitalism at all.

For Deleuze and Guattari, both socialists of a libertarian strain, this observation, far from inducing despair, merely calls for new tactics, and much of their collective work explores such exotic possibilities for resistance and change as micropolitics, lines of flight, war machines and creating Bodies without Organs.

For one of their most adroit interlocutors however, the legendary renegade philosopher-occultist Nick Land, there is no possibility for resistance – capitalism has become some sort of self-perpetuating, ever-accelerating cybernetic feedback system that, virus-like, infects everything in its path. We should submit to its dark will.

Land co-founded the entirely unlikely Cyber Culture Research Unit at the prestigious Warwick University in the mid-90′s; their university-funded activities included producing collaged texts of continental philosophers, William Burroughs and binary code, theorising the voodoo / occult underpinnings of markets, composing abrasive electronic music and, ostensibly, consuming inhuman doses of psychedelics as often as possible. Land’s professional career was cut short by his disavowal of academia in 1997 and subsequent ‘disappearance’, but during those few years he produced a singularly provocative body of work that is becoming increasingly influential within the burgeoning speculative realist movement, culminating in the recent publication of the 666 page compilation of his ‘hyperstition’ (Land’s term for his blend of Lovecraftian theory-fiction), ‘Fanged Noumena’.

As interest in his work grows, Land himself has reappeared in a slightly modified form, filtering his perennial interests in Deleuze and Guattari, cyberpunk and chaos magick through the language of the free market. Topics on his new blog include everything from a bizarre concern about peak humans (what do we do once our capacity to create highly dense living spaces exceeds our capacity to increase the human population) to a much more predictable cheerleading of the Singularity. Whether his new work is partly intended as parody or, instead, Land has merely spent so long trawling the voodoo depths of hyper-capitalism that he has simply become a parody of his earlier self, his recent writing perfectly captures the disturbing absurdities that result from taking free market ideology to its radical conclusion while buying into the assumption that there really is no longer an outside.

Co-founder of the CCRU, theorist and writer Mark Fisher, challenges all this in his newly-published ‘Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?’

In Fisher’s words, capitalist realism is ‘the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it’. From this starting point, he proceeds to explore, through everything from popular films like Children of Men to the theory du jour of Žižek and Badiou, the symptoms of late capitalism and, more vitally, why there is so little resistance to it. Fisher’s ‘realism’ is the ironic distance of postmodern culture – a weary, ‘nothing too serious’ cynicism that staves off totalitarianism and fanaticism and is also a capitulation to the ‘view from nowhere’ of the market: a perennial Hobbesian each against all.

This desensitization to the world results in what Robert Pfaller calls ‘interpassivity’: we collectively acknowledge how our behaviour affects us in a cynical way that performs our reaction for us, allowing us to avoid change. For example, the animated films Wall-E and Avatar perform our resistance to the destruction of the natural world, also acknowledging the negative effects this has for each of us. This then leaves us free to destroy the natural world and wallow in the consequences, this all despite the fact that, as Žižek has observed, ‘cynical distance is just one way to blind ourselves to the structural power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them.’

The loss of value caused by this cynical distancing results in a disenchanted world view Fisher calls ‘reflexive impotence’; a tacit acceptance of the impoverishment of capitalist realism that is characterised by ‘depressive hedonia’: the compulsive seeking out of dulling consumer pleasures (comfort foods, mainstream television, video games, narcotics) at the expense of all else, even though there remains a lingering feeling that something important is missing.

So how do we resist something so insidious? Neither, according to Fisher, by appealing to sentiment nor by questioning the specifics of capitalist ideology. These critiques are easily absorbed because ‘the role of capitalist ideology is not to make an explicit case for something in the way that propaganda does, but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief.’

What we have to do then is to challenge the very assumption that capitalism is indeed some kind of post-ideological view from nowhere, that it’s ‘just how things are’. In part, we do so by exposing the hypocrisies of its functioning, specifically, how it depends on what it disavows. For instance, says Fisher, observing the effects of the move away from state intervention and towards the neoliberal business model in his native UK, capitalism cannot work without bureaucracy. It also requires constant coercion in the form of marketing, advertising and PR. Additionally, it breeds a generalised malaise – as well as an increase in serious psychological dysfunction (see, for instance, Oliver James’s ‘The Selfish Capitalist’) – that runs wholly counter to the happy, healthy, freely exchanging rational subject always presented as the inexorable result of freeing markets.

We also need, according to Fisher, to rethink revolutionary politics: we cannot continue to be satisfied with mere reaction but must also move to create alternatives, even if these are merely prefigurative, alternatives to capitalism that challenge its claims of ubiquity and in doing so undermine its hold on our collective imagination.

This project might be hard, but at the same time, as Fisher concludes, ‘the long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism.’

Through this hole we can already see some distinctly possible – and socialist, in its best, most radically democratic sense – alternatives.