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An_Old_Big_Tree wrote (edited )

Reply to comment by !deleted4371 in by !deleted8217

I'm interested to hear more about what's ahistorical about it and what even ahistorical means. Also I don't remember Desert saying much about population, so if anybody remembers I'd be interested. One thing I love about raddle is our slowly-going-beyond so much of what we started with. Desert is probably a core text around here.

I wrote up a tiny critique of Desert here a while ago, that also links to critiques of post-left stuff more broadly, if anybody is interested. Unfortunately some of the responses to my stuff are deleted.

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[deleted] wrote (edited )

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An_Old_Big_Tree wrote (edited )

Yeah I'd love for you to flesh this out more and I appreciate what you've done so far. I've got some lines of thought in response.

shouldn't a green anarchist at least be aware of permaculture and address it if their goal is to refute any alternative to agro-industrial extraction and therefore argue that a high rate of food production can only be temporary? i guess it'd completely contradict the central premise of the work if they accepted that degrowth was possible as a solution, but they should be able to critique it along with the others, or at least keep the basis of their critique consistent

I assume that, as a green anarchist, they are happy with some kind of permaculture/horticulture arrangement. (other people reading this might be interested to look into a debate between permaculture and horticulture in Backwoods 2). I assume that they think it could work, but not with the current state of the world. That though it would work, the world just is not going to move to permaculture/horticulture because capitalism/civilisation is too deeply entrenched in us. So I think the critique, insofar as it exists, is in the first two paragraphs of Desert - all the things that we can do are good and beautiful but in all likelihood won't be done. I think that this relation to hope is one of the core elements of nihilism - and it seems you aren't nihilist in that way :) Personally I find this line of reason compelling, (and less of a fatalism than a determinism) so I'm very curious about why we seem to disagree.
I've long thought of a movement towards anarchy as something fundamentally multi-generational. And that we just don't have that kind of time.

I agree that a strength of green anarchism is to understand more fully the relationship between social domination and environmental destruction. I think it'd help if you expanded on the second last paragraph because something there isn't clear to me. How would a red anarchist tear apart the argument here?

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[deleted] wrote

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An_Old_Big_Tree wrote

i think a traditional lefty could point out that consumption is much higher in the imperial core than the global periphery and that resource distribution is structured along class lines pretty much everywhere

I think that this is true, but often with the opposite consequences you are imagining. Because socialism tends to propose a middle-class-level lifestyle as what might be the sort of thing everybody gets 'after the revolution'.

Where I live, for example, the average income is about 75US$ a month. People with access to this little money do of course have a tiny ecological footprint. But what socialist class analysis does is effectively offer not just to cut away the footprint of the 10% at the top of the class pyramid, but to dramatically increase the footprint of the 30-50% of people at the bottom, by giving basics like food, shelter, schooling, and healthcare. Usually the "consumption is super high for the people at the top" argument comes from places where the people at the bottom by-and-large still live in houses, and still eke by a living in what looks like a middle-class life (and so you don't imagine their footprints becoming vastly larger when their basic needs are met). But something like a billion of us live in slums, shantytowns, so on.

I don't really know what the world looks like when you even out access to resources while keeping that in mind.

guess any rigidly deterministic interpretation of historical change will always sit poorly with me!

Me too. I'm not being rigidly deterministic, I'm just making my best calculation, and my own politics is the sort that tries to take a sober look at our grim reality while also seeking out tiny, uncompromising ways that we might escape it (mostly a Saidiya Hartman-style approach). I also think that there are things we can and should do to mitigate, and I think that's exactly what desert proposes we do. Think bioregionally, create as liberated spaces as possible, and fight like hell. I like that basic approach, and I think that even though it assumes failure, it's the most likely to be one that does not fail.

The quiet examples from Blessed Is The Flame point out how people who resisted despite having no sense that they would survive the absolutely overwhelming and disempowering nazi death machine were actually more likely to survive. So I think there's a lot to be said for a nihilist resistance for its own sake, for jouissance.

I don't think that survival is valuable on its own. I'm not sure what I think about the value of recovery, except insofar as it's useful to recover things presently.

I am enjoying thinking about this with you.

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ziq wrote

I wonder if people would be less likely to delete their account if there were also a 'retire account' option that just replaces the username with [deleted]? It's gotten to the point where any thread older than a couple months is impossible to read through.

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[deleted] wrote (edited )

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An_Old_Big_Tree wrote (edited )

Cool, hopefully I will :) Excited!

What else is really interesting about what might come of these critiques is how much then they will also be able to be applied to Bellamy's An Invitation To Desertion.

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