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(Susannah, JewishStudies@Dartmouth What Manner of Man Is the Prophet? Cornel West, Abraham Heschel, and the Hebrew Prophets Prophetic Leadership and Visionary Hope New Essays on the Work of Cornel West Ed. Will)

The enactments of disavowal include racial capitalism, enslavement, and Jim Crow segregation; heteropatriarchal homophobic sexuality, misogyny that protects wealthy women and abandons poor women to sexual assault, harassment, and discrimination; and depoliticized intellectual jousts over intersectionality. Herein lies the root of West’s critique of Ta-Nehisi Coates: Coates’s pessimism is produced by focusing on racial identity rather than the deeper economic forces that construct American society. Participating in the disavowal, Coates allows white Americans to adore him because he takes the pessimism onto himself, as a Black condition, and avoids the call to revolution that would challenge more than their guilty emotions. White supremacy, to West, does not exist without capitalist economic structures, and pessimism over race becomes a tool to ignore those structures and disavow the need for radical economic overhaul. Racism keeps capitalism functioning, much as antisemitism was crucial in the political functioning of pre-1945 Europe; Hitler needed antisemitism to come to power and German antisemitism prevented their repudiation of fascism. West writes, “A race-transcending prophet is someone who never forgets about the significance of race but refuses to be confined to race.”58 As George Shulman writes, the problem is “not quite ignorance, but the ‘innocence’ of whites who do not want to know, or who disavow what they already know, about racial injustice, the conduct of the state acting in their name, the humanity of the other.”59 As a “fantastic system of evasions,” innocence itself is the crime.60 Prophecy, for Baldwin, “does not decree a fate but demands a decision.”61

(Eric, Law@Chicago, https://www.lawfareblog.com/neoliberalism-and-human-rights#:~:text=In%20those%20decades%2C%20according%20to,commitment%20to%20meeting%20basic%20needs., 5-1)

The human rights movement in the west attracted cosmopolitan reformers. Heirs to the religiously inspired international political movements of the previous century, these activists sought to end abuses around the world. In the east and south, dissidents who focused inwardly on reforming their own governments were reclassified as human rights activists, and drew sustenance from the international movement. Led by organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, the international human rights movement was initially oriented toward political repression, finding common cause with the dissidents behind the iron curtain and victims of repression elsewhere. But the movement diversified, along with the human rights treaty obligations that it championed, and could best be described, for all the disagreement among its members over priorities and even goals, as an effort to export welfare-state liberalism around the world. The movement—or at least, its most important and visible organizations and leaders—did not promote socialism, or central planning, or full-blown egalitarianism of the sort that could be achieved by high tax rates and generous transfers, or government control of capital and wages. At least not explicitly—one might wonder how the vast range of economic and political protections could be supplied without high tax rates and government involvement in the economy, on the model of Sweden. Socialism withdrew to a handful of miserable outposts. Cuba and North Korea persisted with their socialist ideals as well as central planning long after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Left-wing populists like Hugo Chávez came to power, or maintained power, based on redistributive programs. One suspects that these and other examples reinforced rather than undermined the growing neoliberal consensus. Yet neoliberalism was headed for its own fall. The financial crisis of 2008 and the global recession reminded people of the risks and costs of capitalism. The receding credit bubble exposed a neoliberal legacy of low growth and rising inequality in the west. The immense gains to the rest of the world—including China, India, and other developing countries—was not felt as compensation by those left behind in the rich countries. Instead, it stoked right-wing populist rage against foreigners, and a backlash against international trade and migration. But what does this have to do with human rights? A fringe view blames the human rights movement for the rise of neoliberalism, and the growth of inequality within countries. (Across countries, and in aggregate, inequality has fallen, an inconvenient fact for this view.) Moyn disagrees, but the precise nature of his claim is unclear. He makes much of the fact that the rise of human rights and neoliberalism was temporally correlated. This is hardly a coincidence. With the collapse of socialism, the market economy seemed like the only game in town. Chastened reformers on the left were forced to limit their ambitions. Welfare-state liberal democracy emerged as victor in the west, with the human rights movement and the World Bank playing the evangelists to the rest of the world. Yet Moyn wants to make a larger point—or seems to. He implies that the human rights movement was tainted by its association with neoliberalism. But the human rights movement was not based on or inspired by neoliberalism; it was merely the residue of left reformist thinking once socialism died. Moyn offers no evidence that a human rights movement devoted to egalitarianism would have been able to stop the neoliberal juggernaut, and if there was no realistic alternative, why a taint? In the wake of Soviet-style socialism, which firmly contradicted the suggestion that once economic equality was put into place, political freedom would follow in the natural course of things, the abandonment of Socialist International-style methods of advancing equality seemed quite reasonable or at least politically necessary if any good at all was to be done. Moyn thinks that political and civil rights cannot be sustained in the long term without equality as well. He gestures at an argument that, by ignoring equality, neoliberalism and human rights are responsible for today’s populist backlash. But the populist backlash is predominantly right-wing, not left-wing. If neoliberals are to be blamed for populism, then we should blame their cosmopolitanism, not the plutocratic effects of their policies, and it would follow that this appealing cosmopolitanism was also human rights advocates’ original sin. But it’s not clear how seriously Moyn intends this argument. Like in his earlier book on human rights, Moyn’s preoccupation seems less with uncovering new facts in the archival records than with influencing moral attitudes toward the human rights movement, which has seen itself in triumphal terms. Moyn sees it in elegiac or even tragic terms. If any non-egalitarian social order is morally indefensible, as Moyn seems to think, the human rights movement picked the wrong goal even though it could never have achieved the right one.

(Daniel Estrada, Ethics@Newark, Human supremacy as posthuman risk. Journal of Sociotechnical Critique, 1(1), 1–40.

https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1013&context=sociotechnicalcritique)

(Daniel Estrada, Ethics@Newark, Human supremacy as posthuman risk. Journal of Sociotechnical Critique, 1(1), 1–40.

https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1013&context=sociotechnicalcritique)

(Zachary Manfredi is the Litigation and Advocacy Director at the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project. , 6-21)

What is at stake in couching these visions of tax policy—a domain often sealed off from larger debates about values—in the language of human rights? On the one hand, it might be thought to deepen the appeal of progressive political programs by highlighting how they aim to improve the basic economic, social, and political needs of their constituents. On the other hand, even as major figures on the U.S. political left mount such arguments, recent critical commentary on human rights evinces a longstanding tradition of skepticism about human rights’ emancipatory potential. Some scholars argue that the simultaneous ascendancy of human rights advocacy and neoliberal governance since the 1970s is far from coincidental and trace how neoliberal reformers often relied upon the language of human rights and its affinity with the self-interested, consumerist individual. Others criticize human rights advocacy for its minimalist vision and lament its compatibility with radical inequality. Although this legacy of left skepticism about human rights retains valuable lessons for advocates, our political moment also provides opportunities for the reconceptualization and radicalization of human rights programs. Contemporary appeals to human rights arguably have the most to offer by developing a more egalitarian dimension to the politics of human rights. The traditional liberal conception of human rights as individual entitlements limits the capacity of the state to regulate private power and mobilizes state authority on behalf of private property and capital accumulation. By contrast, progressive appeals to human rights can link this language to a normative vision for a more just social order and the provision of public welfare. Developing an egalitarian vision requires moving beyond a guarantee of sufficient minimums and instead emphasizing how radical social and economic inequality stifle the realization of a more robust and radical human rights project.

(Paul, Paul Gowder is Professor of Law at Northwestern University. 6-13)

In 1860 Frederick Douglass was in exile in Glasgow to avoid arrest in connection with John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. No stranger to revolutionary tactics, Douglass had long known Brown and was accused of being a coconspirator in the raid; after his return to the United States, Douglass even gave a speech in support of Brown. But during his exile, at an event before the Scottish Anti-Slavery Society, he had a different subject: a defense of the potential of the Constitution. In his address, Douglass didn’t contest how the Constitution had been crafted and interpreted to protect the institution of slavery. Nonetheless, he argued that the document had antislavery implications—and, in particular, that “the Constitution will afford slavery no protection when it shall cease to be administered by slaveholders.” Contrary to the followers of William Lloyd Garrison, who understood the Constitution as an ineluctably proslavery document and thought that the dissolution of the Union would be necessary to end slavery, the way forward, as Douglass saw it, was to “vote such men into power as will use their powers for the abolition of slavery.” While much of Douglass’s argument hinged on specific constitutional provisions that were inconsistent with slavery and with the legal regime put in place to support it—the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause being the most obvious—it also relied on a claim about the nature of law itself. “Law is not merely an arbitrary enactment with regard to justice, reason, or humanity,” Douglass said. As a matter of “legal interpretation,” he went on, There must be something more than history—something more than tradition. . . . There is another rule of law. . . . Where a law is susceptible of two meanings, the one making it accomplish an innocent purpose, and the other making it accomplish a wicked purpose, we must in all cases adopt that which makes it accomplish an innocent purpose. As a matter of legal methodology, Douglass was quite right. There is a long tradition in Anglo-American and Commonwealth courts of deploying aggressively narrow judicial interpretation of positive enactments of law in order to preserve an underlying conception of fundamental legality. David Dyzenhaus, for example, has documented the power of common law courts even in systems of parliamentary supremacy to narrowly interpret privative clauses—those that strip individuals of the right of access to courts—in the interests of more fundamental ideas of legal order. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was itself a privative clause that stripped allegedly escaped slaves of judicial protections with which they might defend their freedom. More broadly, Douglass recognized what we might call the entrepreneurial potential of the law. Because law tends to make its claims in universalistic terms, it provides the intellectual material to ground the demand for inclusion. In the case of the United States, which had in fact deployed the rhetoric of universal rights since its inception, Douglass’s argument amounted to saying: the Constitution does prohibit these forms of oppression—and if you took it seriously, you’d enforce those prohibitions. And in making this argument he could appeal to the universality of law itself, along with a methodological tradition that supported it. Douglass’s view has been a perennial touchstone in debates about the Constitution, but it is worth revisiting for another reason, as well. In the political sphere, both scholars and activists involved in movements for social justice have often questioned whether a focus on law and on legal rights promotes individualistic remedies over group solidarity. On this point, Douglass’s argument—and the history of Black liberation movements more broadly—reveals how the language of the law can be a basis for collective demands. While skeptics are right to observe that legal victories alone tend to be unstable, the same can be said about other forms of social transformation—as historian David Waldstreicher recently noted in these pages, even “revolutions aren’t all they’re sometimes cracked up to be”—and there is a rich tradition showing how legal and political efforts can reinforce rather than undermine one another. At a moment in which both the rule of law and the progress toward racial and social justice of the last half-century in the United States appear to be under severe threat, this history shows how the law can remain an essential resource in building a more just world.

(Daniel, Kainos Anthropos: Existential Precarity and Human Universality in the Earth System Anthropocene new formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics Lawrence & Wishart Volume 107-108, 2022)

Since the 1950s, the disturbing prospect that humankind as a whole might die together has helped to drive a revolutionary research programme revealing the myriad ways in which humankind lives together and sustains its existence in inextricable entanglement with the rest of earthly life. As the nonlinear lineaments of the Earth System increasingly entered into scientific awareness, so too did the realisation of how easily they could be severed, altered or nudged towards new self-reinforcing dynamics. Crutzen – co-discoverer of nuclear winter and populariser of the Anthropocene – received his 1995 Nobel Prize for his prominent role in identifying how the decay of CFCs drives atmospheric ozone depletion. The chemist used the opportunity of his Nobel Lecture to warn of what a near miss the ozone crisis had been. Bromine, he noted, operates much like chlorine (the first C in CFCs), but turns out to be almost 100 times more dangerous for ozone than chlorine (itself disastrous) on an atom-for-atom basis. ‘This brings up the nightmarish thought,’ he cautioned, ‘that if the chemical industry had developed organobromine compounds instead of the CFCs … then without any preparedness, we would have been faced with a catastrophic ozone hole everywhere and at all seasons during the 1970s, probably before the atmospheric chemists had developed the necessary knowledge to identify the problem and the appropriate techniques for the necessary critical measurements. Noting that nobody had given any thought to the atmospheric consequences of the release of Cl [chlorine] or Br [bromine] before 1974, I can only conclude that mankind has been extremely lucky …’81 My contention here is that Crutzen was not naively reintroducing Enlightenment ‘Man’ or a ‘universal format of humanity’ when claiming that ‘mankind has been extremely lucky’ in not inadvertently flensing away the ozone layer and subjecting all life on land to a drastic increase in ultraviolet radiation whose effects on mice, humans, moss and ‘the interconnected web of life are not within the realm of the calculable’ (The Fate of the Earth, p82). There are surely many instances in which the systemic totality that takes shape as the Anthropos of the Earth System Anthropocene can be used to engender ‘mystification and political paralysis’. However, I propose that the single most politically urgent aspect of the Kainos Anthropos is the disquieting awareness that the universally interconnected, mutually sustaining flows of life on Earth were discovered against the backdrop of universal death. Whether or not the ‘bomb spike’ laid down by global fallout eventually comes to serve as the stratigraphic marker for a distinct geological epoch, the new sciences that culminated in Crutzen’s Cuernavaca declaration that ‘we’re in the Anthropocene’ have always carried an explicitly existential edge – one that has only grown sharper as the dynamics of a delicately balanced Earth System come more clearly into focus. In his landmark 1966 study The Order of Things, Michel Foucault famously asserted that ‘man is an invention of recent date’ produced by ‘a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge,’ proceeding to propose: ‘If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility … were to cause them to crumble … then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’.82 Writing at the high water mark of the ‘cybernetics craze,’83 Foucault could not have made a safer bet. Already, ‘the fundamental arrangements of knowledge’ that had been used to inscribe so many humanist definitions of the abiding essence of Man were giving way to cybernetics-inspired systems approaches ‘whose object would be the relations among the elements of a whole rather than the elements themselves—a science of the totalities generated by these relations’ (as one particularly apt observer put it).84 In this sense, the Kainos Anthropos of the Earth System Anthropocene was born quite literally post-humanist by systems thinkers who held that whatever may be most essentially true about human beings resides not at the core of their substance, but arises actively in the mutually sustaining connections that they form both with one another and all the other systems that they inhabit and that inhabit them – from the cellular to the planetary. Rather than reprising the dictum that ‘the whole is the false’ or continuing to ‘wage a war on totality’,85 one of the most politically pressing challenges facing those alive today involves taking the Earth System Anthropocene on its own terms and existentially risky terrain. Seventy years after the detonation of the first hydrogen bomb, political and critical theorists have still barely begun to make political sense of what it means to belong to a collective of beings capable of authoring their own total erasure. For the first time, it has become possible to claim that ‘we are all in this together’ based on the scientifically sound awareness that ‘everything is connected’. The increasingly precise knowledge of the shape these connections take makes establishing previously unconsidered forms of solidarity within the Kainos Anthropos possible. The ever-encroaching spectre of universal death makes it necessary.

(Daniel, Kainos Anthropos: Existential Precarity and Human Universality in the Earth System Anthropocene new formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics Lawrence & Wishart Volume 107-108, 2022)

In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul the Apostle writes of his Messiah: ‘He himself is our peace, who has made the two groups [Jews and gentiles] one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace.’70 In this passage Paul is describing the radical reconciliation of both Jew and gentile in the creation of one universal communion for all humankind. The phrase translated here as ‘new humanity’ is Kainos Anthropos (καινός άνθρωπος).71 In 2000, Paul Crutzen announced the arrival of another form of human universality. Like his namesake, however, Crutzen was merely the messenger; the apostle of a gospel whose central tenets had already been established decades prior.72 Crutzen had expressed his frustration that day in Cuernavaca that Earth System scientists presenting their findings at a meeting of the IGBP could continue to blithely discuss the Holocene as if they did not know that ‘the people of the Earth are no longer simple spectators to the drama of Earth evolution but have become active participants on a worldwide scale’. Had they not heard the bad news? Far from being an innovation, Crutzen’s declaration that ‘we’re in the Anthropocene!’ was ‘conceived as more of a rhetorical prod,’73 a reminder, and a convenient shorthand for designating the pervasive planetary impact being caused by human beings as seen from the perspective of Earth System science. In the resulting Anthropocene there are neither Jews nor gentiles, but instead a tangle of human systems bound by (highly asymmetrical and inegalitarian) flows of matter, energy and information that inextricably link them to their environment and one another.74 A new humanity emerges within this welter: a Kainos Anthropos that reconceives human totality in terms of universal planetary connection as components of a single system whose mutually sustaining interactions only tail off somewhere in the near-void of space. Born in the post-cybernetic systems milieu of the 1980s, the Kainos Anthropos of the Anthropocene hails from a paradigmatically different point of origin; one that has very little to do with the Aristotelian world of primary substances, secondary qualities and specific differences that inspired over two millennia of Western humanist endeavours to universally define what a human being essentially is by Nature. Here, the emphasis instead shifts away from endless taxonomic and definitional questions regarding the true nature of humanity and towards interrogating the systemic structure of the planet-scale flows that sustain eight billion human lives in highly unequal and ecologically ruinous relationships. By this point, I hope to have impressed the possibility that the Anthropos of the Earth System Anthropocene does not simply represent the tradition of all the dead generations of humanists returned to weigh like a nightmare on the minds of the living. Ironically – tragically, even – it often seems to be the many vocal academic anti-humanists themselves who continue to raise this spectre so that they can proceed to banish it once more, perceiving in the human totality of the Anthropos the image of their old foe: the Enlightenment universalist definition of ‘European Man as model and ideal’ with all his constitutive exclusions, hierarchies and repressions.75 The Kainos Anthropos of the Anthropocene does not, as feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti says of ‘the human of Humanism’, ‘stand for normality, normalcy and normativity’ or ‘function by transposing a specific mode of being human into a generalised standard, which acquires transcendent values as the human: from male to masculine and onto human as the universalised format of humanity’ (The Posthuman, pp26-28). Instead, it seeks to express the interactions that the sum total of human beings have with their planetary environment – continually shaping and being shaped in a dynamic dance performed on the edge of an ecological cliff. It approaches ‘humanity’ in the functional terms of combined human activities and the vernacular of systems science, not normatively in the venerable Western language of philosophical anthropology or Aristotelian metaphysical biology.76 As the authors of The Anthropocene: A Multidisciplinary Approach aptly observe, ‘If human systems have for the first time ever transformed the Earth System, then the old humanist ideas about who we are, what we can change and what we can’t, and what we might hope to achieve are recast …’77 Because the universalism of the Kainos Anthropos departs so markedly from the traditional concerns of Western humanism, it should come as no surprise that many well-established forms of anti-humanist critique risk missing much of what is newest and most urgent in the image of human totality furnished by Earth System science. As the authors quoted above further note, ‘No consideration of what being human means can ignore the vision of the anthropos as the sum total of human impacts on the planet. Yet this singular figure does not erase the many other anthropo[i] operating at multiple scales of time and place, contributing differently to the Anthropocene trajectory, and suffering its effects unequally’ (The Anthropocene, p197). In other words – and this is crucial – although one of the first lessons of the Kainos Anthropos is that all humans are appreciably connected, both to one another and the rest of earthly life, this awareness in no way precludes the possibility of scaling down to address specific clusters or kinds of human activities and the wildly disproportionate roles that they play in sustaining the wealth, prestige and power of some; the expropriation, exploitation and exclusion of many; and the potential extermination of all. There may ultimately prove to be many politically sound reasons for choosing to reject the designation ‘Anthropocene’ in favour of other more diagnostic propositions such as the (m)Anthropocene, Eurocene or Capitalocene.78 However, the reflex to reject all discussion of humanity in universal terms and redirect attention towards familiar culprits such as patriarchy, European colonisation or capital risks reducing the starkly novel challenges of perspective and scale that have arisen since the mid-twentieth century.79 While the idea that ‘everything is connected’ may be ancient, the ability to begin to map, represent and model those connections in detail is barely a half century old, bringing with it a radically new set of resources for reconceiving the terms in which political thinkers frame human universality and totality. Those alive today have still barely begun to explore the political tensions that open up in the ontologically alien world of complex planetary interconnection furnished by Earth System science. I believe that it would be a tragic mistake to forego the present opportunity to develop a cartography of the Kainos Anthropos of the Anthropocene and the novel political potentials and pitfalls of its unfolding terrain, in favour of instead offering yet another critique of capitalism or colonialism (however crucial these remain).80

(Nathan Alexander Sears, , 6-6)

Existential risk poses challenging questions for governance that—with humanity's limited wisdom—are difficult to answer. Who decides humanity's “grand strategy”? Who provides “existential security”? In essence, who speaks and acts on behalf of “humanity”? (Sears, 2020b). The Precipice only begins to answer such difficult questions. Since the study of existential risk is both in its infancy and has tended to be dominated by white English-speaking men—like myself and Ord—there are no doubt serious blind spots in how we conceptualize “humanity” and “existential risk.” As Mitchell and Chaudhury (2020) recently argued, It is often claimed that the “end of the world” is approaching—but whose world, exactly, is expected to end? … Their central aim is to diagnose the gravest global threats and to offer strategies to protect the future of what they regard as “humanity.” Yet, despite their claims to universality, we argue that these “end of the world” discourses are more specifically concerned about protecting the future of whiteness. Personally, I see Ord's book as making a valuable contribution to a particular understanding of existential risk, shaped largely by the author's conception of “humanity's potential.” I see Mitchell and Chaudhury's critique as not just an important call for greater diversity in the study of existential risk, but as a challenge to critically reflect on the meaning of “humanity”—including its past, present, and future. What some see as “humanity's potential” may for others represent an “existential catastrophe” (see Grove, 2019; Mitchell, 2017). Thus, it may be necessary for the “long reflection” to precede “existential security” (p. 189); for only reflection might make it possible to build shared understandings about what “humanity” is, the existential risks “we” face, and how to go about “securing our potential.”

(Jessica, Humanities@UChicago, Impossible Futures: Fictions of Risk in the Longue Durée, American Literature (2017) 89 (4): 761–789.)

If contemporary ecocriticism has a shared premise about environmental risk it is that genre is the key to both perceiving and, possibly, correcting ecological crisis. Frederick Buell’s 2003 From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century has established one of the most central oppositions of this paradigm. As his title suggests, Buell tells the story of a discourse that began in the apocalyptic mode in the 1960s and 70s, when discussions of “the immanent end of nature” most commonly took the form of “prophecy, revelation, climax, and extermination” before turning away from apocalypse when the prophesied ends failed to arrive (112, 78). Buell offers his suggestion for the appropriate literary mode for life lived within a crisis that is both unceasing and inescapable: new voices, “if wise enough….will abandon apocalypse for a sadder realism that looks closely at social and environmental changes in process and recognizes crisis as a place where people dwell” (202-3). In a world of threat, Buell demands a realism that might help us see risks more clearly and aid our survival.¶ Buell’s argument has become a broadly held view in contemporary risk theory and ecocriticism, overlapping fields in the social sciences and humanities that address the foundational question of second modernity: “how do you live when you are at such risk?” (Woodward 2009, 205).1 Such an assertion, however, assumes both that realism is a neutral descriptive practice and that apocalypse is not something that is happening now in places that we might not see, or cannot hear. This essay argues for the continuing importance of apocalyptic narrative forms in representations of environmental risk to disrupt conservative realisms that maintain the statusquo. Taking the ecological disaster of nuclear waste as my case study, I examine two fictional treatments of nuclear waste dumps that create different temporal structures within which the colonial history of the United States plays out. The first, a set of Department of Energy documents that use statistical modeling and fictional description to predict a set of realistic futures for the site of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico (1991), creates a present that is fully knowable and a future that is fully predictable. Such an approach, I suggest, perpetuates the state logics of implausibility that have long undergirded settler colonialism in the United States. In contrast, Leslie Marmon Silko’s contemporaneous novel Almanac of the Dead (1991) uses its apocalyptic form to deconstruct the claims to verisimilitude that undergird state realism, transforming nuclear waste into a prophecy of the end of the United States rather than a means for imagining its continuation. In Almanac of the Dead, the presence of nuclear waste introjects a deep-time perspective into contemporary America, transforming the present into a speculative space where environmental catastrophe produces not only unevenly distributed damage but also revolutionary forms of social justice that insist on a truth that probability modeling cannot contain: that the future will be unimaginably different from the present, while the present, too, might yet be utterly different from the real that we think we know.¶ Nuclear waste is rarely treated in ecocriticism or risk theory, for several reasons: it is too manmade to be ecological; its catastrophes are ongoing, intentionally produced situations rather than sudden disasters; and it does not support the narrative that subtends ecocritical accounts of risk perception in which the nuclear threat gives rise to an awareness of other kinds of threat before reaching the end of its relevance at the end of the Cold War.2 In what follows, I argue that the failure of nuclear waste to fit into the critical frames created by ecocriticism and risk theory to date offers an opportunity to expand those frames and overcome some of their limitations, especially the impulse towards a paranoid, totalizing realism that Peter van Wyck (2005) has described as central to ecocriticism in the risk society. Nuclear waste has durational forms that dwarf the human. It therefore dwells less in the economy of risk as it is currently conceptualized and more in the blown-out realm of deep time. Inhabiting the temporal scale that has recently been christened the Anthropocene, the geological era defined by the impact of human activities on the world’s geology and climate, nuclear waste unsettles any attempt at realist description, unveiling the limits of human imagination at every turn.3 By analyzing risk society through a heuristic of nuclear waste, this essay offers a critique of nuclear colonialism and environmental racism. At the same time, it shows how the apocalyptic mode in deep time allows narratives of environmental harm and danger to move beyond the paranoid logic of risk. In the world of deep time, all that might come to pass will come to pass, sooner or later. The endless maybes of risk become certainties. The impossibilities of our own deaths and the deaths of everything else will come. But so too will other impossibilities: talking macaws and alien visitors; the end of the colonial occupation of North America, perhaps, or a sudden human determination to let the world live. The end of capitalism may yet become more thinkable than the end of the world. Just wait long enough. Stranger things will happen.¶

(Mari, CriticalTheory@Toronto, The Ethiscs of Opting Out: Queer Theory’s Defiant Subjects)

Let me put some of my cards on the table right away: I think that this critique misses its mark quite drastically in the sense that, whatever faith Munoz and Dean might have in new social collectivities, they do not, as Edelman implies, support liberal humanism's dreams of redemption through greater inclusion; they do not believe that simply allowing previously marginalized subjects to enter the existing system would miraculously conjure away the system's problems. Quite the contrary, both are deeply critical of the homonormative quest for social respectability that characterizes much of liberal gay and lesbian politics. In Cruising Utopia (2009), Munoz in fact explicitly condemns homonormative gays and lesbians who allow themselves to be seduced by the material and symbolic rewards of neoliberal capitalism. One could of course point out that Edelman could not have known in 2006 what Munoz was going to say in a book that was published three years later. But this does not change the fact that Edelman's accusation rings false for the simple reason that it is aimed at two progressive critics who are so well versed in the basics of posthumanist theory that they in many ways take the demise of the humanist self for granted. I cannot think of a single critic within queer theory who naively endorses the sovereign subject of liberal humanism. If anything-as I have already noted and will discuss in greater detail in the next chapter-the field, like the rest of American progressive theory, seems to be caught up in a compulsive cycle of needing to repeatedly expunge this subject even when very little of it remains. Furthermore, the idea that utopian thinking is by definition liberal, that there is no room for utopianism within posthumanist paradigms, is an indication of the extent to which certain strands of posthumanist theory have solidified into lifeless patterns that no longer serve a critical function; in such instances, the monotonous repetition of poststructuralist dogmas-in Edelman's case, "hopefulness bad, negativity good" (which, notably, has the same starkly binaristic structure as Butler's "autonomy bad, relationality good")-serves to bar alternative perspectives that might revitalize contemporary theory by allowing us to think beyond bad-good archetypes. In this sense, Munoz's statement regarding Edelman's "well-worn war chest of poststructuralist pieties" (2009, 10) is right on target, as is his rebuke of the "various romances of negativity" that have, within queer theory, become so predictable as to be "resoundingly anticritical" (12). If Edelman's accusations against Munoz are relatively easy to dismiss, the reverse is not the case, for Munoz's indicts Edelman for perpetuating a clandestine-and therefore all the more insidious-form of white gay male identity politics: a politics that flees from the (supposedly) contaminating impact that a consideration of gender, racial, economic, and global inequalities might have on queer theory and that refuses to recognize that the white gay male subject is just as "identitarian" as any other subject. Munoz asserts that the only reason Edelman is able to dodge the specter of identity politics is that, in Edelman's work, white masculinity falsely configures-as it has always done-the "universal;' "neutral" subject position that (seemingly) resides beyond identitarian concern. More generally speaking, Munoz believes that antisocial queer theories "reproduce a crypto-universal white gay subject that is weirdly atemporal" (2009, 94). Hiram Perez makes an analogous point when he criticizes not only the ways in which whiteness, in the work of many white gay men, "makes itself transparent" (2005, 187) but also the ways in which poststructuralist rhetoric is used to level charges of essentialism against anyone who dares to call attention to this problem. Along the same lines, Halberstam rails against the "invisible identity politics of white gay men," adding that when "white men (gay or straight) pursue the interests of white men (gay or straight), there's a heap of trouble for everyone else" (2006, 231). Munoz adds a final blow when he concludes that "imagining a queer subject who is abstracted from the sensuous intersectionalities that mark our experience . . . is a ticket whose price most cannot afford" (2009, 96). The battle lines are thus clearly drawn between those-(some) white gay men-for whom sexuality is the sole axis of theoretical investigation and those for whom sexuality is just one among many such axes. Munoz does not pull his punches, notoriously calling-in the course of the PMLA exchange-the antisocial thesis "the gay white man's last stand" (2006, 825). In Cruising Utopia, he in turn argues that Edelman "anticipates and bristles against his future critics with a precognitive paranoia'' by predicting that some identitarian critics might contest his polemic by arguing that it is "determined by his middle-class white male positionality" (2009, 95). Munoz's candid assessment of Edelman's efforts to inoculate himself against this critique is that it "does not do the job'' (95). The stakes of Munoz's accusation are high, revolving around the question of who can afford to relinquish all hope of a better future in the way that Edelman's rendering of queer negativity-with includes the derisive critique of the child as a sentimental emblem of reproductive futurity that I mentioned in chapter 1-calls for. Munoz suggests that only those who "have" a future in the first place have the luxury of flirting with the idea of rejecting it; conversely, those whose futures are concretely (empirically) threatened are unlikely to advocate the annihilation of these futures. More specifically, Munoz contends that it would be disastrous to "hand over futurity to normative white reproductive futurity," arguing that the fact that this version of futurity is currently winning "is all the more reason to call on a utopian political imagination that will enable us to glimpse another time and place: a 'not-yet' where queer youths of color actually get to grow up" (2009, 95-96). In this manner, Munoz alerts us to the fact that while Edelman elevates the child to an icon of reproductive futurity, "the future" has never been the province of all children; that is, though Munoz agrees with the broad outlines of Edelman's critique of reproductive futurity, he reminds us that this critique does not apply to the vast majority of the world's children, that "racialized kids, queer kids, are not the sovereign princes of futurity'' (95). Like Edelman, Munoz admits that the world as it stands is "not enough" (2009, 96), not able to offer adequate resources for subjective flourishing. But in his view, the way to deal with the world's insufficiency and messiness is not to reject the future wholesale but rather to reconfigure its parameters. This, Munoz asserts, can only be done by resurrecting "various principles of hope that are, by their very nature, relational" (94). As he elaborates, relationality may not always be "pretty," "but the option of simply opting out of it, or describing it as something that has never been available to us, is imaginable only if one can frame queerness as a singular abstraction that can be subtracted and isolated from a larger social matrix" (94).

(Ben, CEO of International Nepal Fellowship Australia – a charity supporting healthcare and community development in Nepal. For over 20 years Ben has worked and campaigned with leading Christian NGOs and campaigning groups in Australia and Nepal. Extinction: Worth rebelling against , Nov)

So how does Crisp persuade himself, and attempt to persuade the reader, that maybe extinction is for the best? Largely by disguising the weaknesses in utilitarian philosophy through the very nature of the thought experiment he poses. The hypothetical asteroid, it turns out, is not just (hypothetically) destroying all life on Earth; it is also doing a lot of work to divorce Crisp’s moral logic from any encounter with the actual threats the world faces. The asteroid of the argument diverts our attention away from the rational actors – particularly corporations and politicians – who are most responsible for causing and contributing to these threats. Its presence in the argument also obstructs any reasoned consideration of privilege and inequality, providing – as unlikely as it seems in a discussion of planetary extinction – a measure of psychic comfort for people whose privilege and power derive from and drive the causes of the threats, namely fossil fuel extraction and the rampant plunder of the natural world. First, Crisp’s asteroid disguises the responsibility and agency of those who are causing or contributing to actually existing existential threats. The hypothetical asteroid cannot be held responsible (even hypothetically) for posing an existential threat to life on Earth. That is not the case with the existential threats of runaway climate change, nuclear conflict and ecosystem collapse. Those causing or contributing to each of those current and actual threats are rational and morally responsible agents – corporations, governments and individuals. It is not wrong for the Prime Minister to urge us to ‘adapt to’ climate change as he did in the wake of Australia’s catastrophic 2019–20 bushfires. Climate disruption and harm is part of our present and foreseeable future, so it is important to prepare ourselves and support others to prepare. Yet the attempt to divert attention away from the government’s capacity and responsibility to address the root causes (not merely effects) of climate change is deeply disingenuous. Particularly while the government he now leads – and has been a senior member of since 2013 – directs significant energy and resources towards making the problem worse by undermining or delaying Australia’s urgently- needed transition towards zero-emission energy, transport and agriculture. Second Crisp’s thought-experiment collapses morally meaningful distinctions between those who suffer enormous pain and those who do not. Crisp is aware of the euthanasic connotations of his argument and draws them to the surface. Many of us, he acknowledges, do not suffer terribly in life and would experience extinction as a grievous loss. But, he asks, for those who suffer atrociously, might not extinction come as a blessed relief? Reflecting on the person-destroying experience of torture, he asks whether extinction might not be a good thing if it ensured that no person among the billions still to be born would experience torture of the kind that disfigures both body and soul. Possibly; but this is surely an argument for putting an end to torture and torturers rather than to all life on Earth. Although, according to the attenuated utilitarian logic underpinning Crisp’s thought experiment, if you encounter Torturer and Victim, and can only end the existence of one of them, you should consider killing the Victim, whose suffering – we assume – is quantifiably greater than the Torturer inflicting it. It is worth noting also that Crisp nowhere asks the victims of torture whether, given what they have suffered, they would prefer to have died. Which seems odd, as people’s valuing of their own lives – even without considering the value of the lives of innumerable other creatures into the future – ought to give him pause. He never once considers what it is that drives the vast majority of those who suffer to continue to fight for, or cling desperately to, their very survival and some semblance of dignity and hope. Which is simply to say that the value of existence is not easily weighed in a scale against an Oxford don’s projections of possible future suffering. Non-existence is, indeed, the end of all such calculations of suffering versus utility and to embrace it is not utilitarianism but, rather, nihilism. By obliterating all of ‘us’, the comfortable and the afflicted, at the same moment, the hypothetical asteroid also obscures a kind of genocidal logic that emerges when legitimate moral questions about end-of-life care or assisted dying for a suffering individual are applied to whole populations. In Crisp’s thought-experiment, there is no point asking who exactly suffers, how and at whose hands they suffer and what could be done to avoid, alleviate or provide redress for the suffering. We are all (hypothetically) equal when the hypothetical asteroid snuffs us out equally. In the real world, though, the specifics of who suffers, why and at whose hands they suffer, and what should be done in response is of enormous moral significance. Comfortable people taking comfort in the idea that extinction will end the suffering of others has a noxious historical pedigree. The comforting fantasy that extinction could provide a merciful end to suffering at population or planetary level should be particularly horrifying for Australians, where the genocidal dispossession of First Nations peoples was justified by just such Social Darwinist myth-making. Nineteenth and early twentieth century policy-making was predicated on the undisputed ‘backwardness’ of First Nations peoples and their inevitable demise, leading anthropologists Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen (1899) to assert that the only course of action was to make their ‘path to final extinction... as pleasant as possible’. Political leaders are not wrong to urge that we will need to ‘live with’ Covid-19. The coronavirus and its impacts are now an ever-present and rapidly-evolving global reality. This glib slogan, though, paints over the vast inequalities in how we will live with the pandemic at a national and global level. We are not all equally likely to suffer ill-effects from COVID-19; people in poverty and those with underlying health conditions are most at risk. We are not all equally able to avoid exposure to the virus; people with insecure work, inadequate housing and little social protection are most exposed and least able to cope with the public health measures – such as business closures and travel lockdowns – used to contain the virus’ spread. We do not have equal access to vaccines and treatment; we can already see that First Nations Australians and people in poorer communities pay the price for historic neglect and contemporary misjudgements. The same – or even greater – inequalities of exposure, impact and capacity to respond apply when considering how climate change will affect communities in Australia and around the world. Finally, the immediacy of Crisp’s hypothetical asteroid strike – ending all human and non-human suffering in an instant – obscures the temporal reality of the actual existential threats we face. Climate change, nuclear conflict and ecosystem collapse will not mercifully end the suffering of all in a single, terrible instant. Rather – with the possible exception of all-out nuclear war – they will mercilessly increase suffering, particularly for people whose lives and security are already precarious. The extinctions they cause will not be swift, but protracted and painful – a species at a time, an ecosystem at a time, a life at a time, a marginal community at a time, an island nation at a time. In short, asteroids make for gripping science-fiction but are less helpful when it comes to moral philosophy. Embracing a truly biblical vision of life will lead us to conclusions entirely different to those Crisp draws. While space forbids a fuller treatment of a subject touched on in every part of the Bible, from Genesis to Wisdom and Prophetic literature, from the Gospels to the New Testament Epistles, it is worth noting briefly how the book of Revelation points us towards these alternative conclusions. While the blood-drenched imagery of Revelation has been used in some quarters to justify an indifference to the created order, it provides, in fact, resources to resist this indifference and to rebel against extinction and ‘the destroyers of the Earth’ (Revelation 11:18). The elders and the angels who gather round the enthroned lamb in the visions that animate the early chapters of John’s Apocalypse are joined by the four living creatures – lion, ox, human person and eagle – who represent all of creation joining in worship. Later, John will portray parodic counterfeits of this true worship of the One who brings life – worship of the dragon and the beast and fornication (a common prophetic and apocalyptic metaphor for idolatrous worship) with the woman of Babylon (Revelation 13–18). Collectively, these represent the idolatrous religion of empire, the targeted violence of empire and the extractive and exploitative wealth of empire. These powers who stand against the people and purposes of God are the destroyers of the Earth who are themselves slated for destruction, as God overturns the ‘kingdom of the world’ and remakes it as ‘the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah’. John’s call to Christians in this context is a call to resist and rebel, to ‘come out of’ the seductive and coercive embrace of empire’s wealth, violence and idolatry. As Richard Bauckham notes in his Theology of The Book of Revelation, By no means all of [John’s] readers were poor and persecu­ted by an oppressive system: many were affluent and compro­mising with the oppressive system. The latter are offered not consolation and encouragement, but severe warnings and calls to repent. We cannot rest easy with a philosophical indifference to the ecocidal exploitation and pollution of our Earth. We must not go along with political leaders who can plan for submarines to be developed for wars decades hence but who refuse to plan and act to prevent the extinction catastrophes we are witnessing now. Unlike Crisp’s asteroid, the actual existential threats we face are caused and exacerbated by rational and moral agents who can be confronted, restrained and called to account. Suffering and extinctions from climate change, nuclear conflict and ecosystem collapse are not inevitable results of cosmic chance and Newtonian physics, but are the entirely avoidable consequences of human choice and indifference. The indescribable suffering – and extinctions – these threats are already causing and will continue to cause harm us all. Though they will harm already marginalised and vulnerable communities disproportionately, while the comfortable use their wealth and privilege to secure physical and psychic comfort for as long as possible, even in the face of implacably intensifying and entirely avoidable catastrophe. So, the only moral, and indeed Christian, conclusion to be drawn from Crisp's propositions is not the one that he cautiously entertains: that maybe extinction wouldn’t be so bad. The only moral conclusion of these propositions is a commitment to action; to rebel against threats to life with all our might. And, indeed, to rebel loudly against leaders who respond to these existential threats not with urgency and ambition, but by admonishing us to protest – if protest we must – a little more quietly, a little more politely.

(Daniel P., postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford Existential Risk Initiative THE IMMANENT APOCALYPSE: HUMANITY AND THE ENDS OF THE WORLD A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy)

For my part, I see no inconsistency between, on the one hand, Foucault’s avowed antihumanism and endorsement of the situated struggles waged by the ‘specific’ intellectual and his endorsement of the peculiar situation of the atomic scientists on the other. Instead, I believe it would be a tremendous mistake to assume that Western humanists somehow possessed a monopoly on universalism or that any mention of totality revives all that was most dubious in traditional Western metaphysics. Foucault himself seems to takes for granted that, to rephrase his earlier claim slightly: because ‘the atomic scientists had a direct and localized relation to scientific knowledge and institutions’ (or ‘specific position in the order of knowledge’), they could credibly ‘articulate a discourse that could at the same time be the discourse of the universal’ because ‘the nuclear threat affected the whole human race and the fate of the world.’194 At issue here is the difference between two types of universalism that both crop up in Foucault’s work and are easy to confuse but reward keeping separate. This involves what philosopher and Foucault scholar Colin Koopman lucidly identifies as “a crucial distinction between universality and universalizability, or what might be described as a distinction between eternal universals and historical universals, or in yet another way as necessary universality and contingent universalizability.”195 Expressed in these terms, it is clear that almost all claims to ‘necessary universality’ in human affairs have rightly come to be viewed with reflexive suspicion over the course of the last half century. At the same time, there have also been many who have permitted the belief that “the whole is the false”196 to be the last word in political wisdom while overlooking the ‘contingent universalizability’ of a growing number of phenomena that can credibly claim to impinge on the lives of every living human being. Universal death did not exist when Foucault was born in 1926. It became universal at a terrestrial scale when the creation of massed stockpiles of thermonuclear weapons breached the biological threshold of modernity by introducing the power to kill life itself. There is nothing necessary about the prospect of universal death by hydrogen bomb, just as the prospect of annihilating all complex life in nuclear fire or a tide of synthetic viruses robbed the whole order of terrestrial Nature of any lingering claim it might have had to being ‘necessary.’ What remains is a near infinitude of contingent processes that collectively make up the continuous flux of a finite Earth. Within this welter, it has become possible for human beings to initiate new processes that universally impinge on the survival of all human beings, and even all complex life. While it remains urgently necessary to treat all contingently universal claims with careful scrutiny, the introduction of the power to kill life itself into human affairs means that the critical thinkers of today should not be too hasty in concluding that “whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat”197 or that “despite their claims to universality…‘end of the world’ discourses are more specifically concerned about protecting the future of whiteness.”198

(Ruth Wilson, Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and professor of geography in Earth and Environmental Sciences at The City University of New York, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation)

“Symbolic contingencies,” E. San Juan Jr. writes, “can metamorphose into nodes of condensation in programmatic goals and actions.”3 The object status of African American women in the Academy is that of Decorative Beasts. That is, we are fixtures embodying Le Carré’s seventeenth century image of exclusion/marginality and his nineteenth century image of imperialism/exoticism plus the supporting base for the entire modern edifice: slavery/commodity itself. Decorative Beasts are alibis for the Academy, living symbols whose occasional display is contingent on the Academy’s need to illustrate certain ideological triumphs: capitalism, for example, or Christianity, equality, democracy, multiculturalism. If we keep in mind the representations of marginality/exoticism/commodity, but shift our analysis from object to subject, we initiate a political and cultural metamorphosis enabled by economic conditions. From this strategy Decorative Beasts, as symbolic contingencies, seize agency. That is, we become able to negotiate positions from which to disarticulate the power of the alibi—through our goals and actions to instigate insurgency and provoke transformation. How is this so? The Academy is in crisis. The effects of two major upheavals in the political economy of the Academy during the contemporary moment (World War II to present [1991]) condense in this historical conjuncture. The first upheaval consisted of the Academy’s reluctant then boosterish growth occasioned by federal fiscal interventions and the baby boom. The second is the Academy’s intensive but decentered efforts to maintain discursive practices and non-discursive operations into the debt-ridden and demographically alien near future. I hope to show (using Cornel West’s formulation) that there are “conjunctural opportunities” in, as it were, the interstices of “structural constraints.”4 The crisis provides a “window of opportunity” for Decorative Beasts’ access to the money, time, space, books, and equipment, and people constitutive of and constituted by the Academy. The window will not stay open long; the area beyond is not reserved in any particular name. The conjuncture unrolls, and with it a corresponding revolution. Who is in the vanguard?

(Nick, PhD IR @LSE, Alex, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a world without work)

Today it appears that the greatest amount of effort is needed to achieve the smallest degree of change. Millions march against the Iraq War, yet it goes ahead as planned. Hundreds of thousands protest austerity, but unprecedented budget cuts continue. Repeated student protests, occupations and riots struggle against rises in tuition fees, but they continue their inexorable advance. Around the world, people set up protest camps and mobilise against economic inequality, but the gap between the rich and the poor keeps growing. From the alter-globalisation struggles of the late 1990s, through the antiwar and ecological coalitions of the early 2000s, and into the new student uprisings and Occupy movements since 2008, a common pattern emerges: resistance struggles rise rapidly, mobilise increasingly large numbers of people, and yet fade away only to be replaced by a renewed sense of apathy, melancholy and defeat. Despite the desires of millions for a better world, the effects of these movements prove minimal. A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE PROTEST Failure permeates this cycle of struggles, and as a result, many of the tactics on the contemporary left have taken on a ritualistic nature, laden with a heavy dose of fatalism. The dominant tactics - protesting, marching, occupying, and various other forms of direct action - have become part of a well established narrative, with the people and the police each playing their assigned roles. The limits of these actions are particularly visible in those brief moments when the script changes. As one activist puts it, of a protest at the 2001 Summit of the Americas: On April 20, the first day of the demonstrations, we marched in our thousands towards the fence, behind which 34 heads of state had gathered to hammer out a hemispheric trade deal. Under a hail of catapult-launched teddy bears, activists dressed in black quickly removed the fence’s supports with bolt cutters and pulled it down with grapples as onlookers cheered them on. For a brief moment, nothing stood between us and the convention centre. We scrambled atop the toppled fence, but for the most part we went no further, as if our intention all along had been simply to replace the state's chain-link and concrete barrier with a human one of our own making.1 We see here the symbolic and ritualistic nature of the actions, combined with the thrill of having done something - but with a deep uncertainty that appears at the first break with the expected narrative. The role of dutiful protestor had given these activists no indication of what to do when the barriers fell. Spectacular political confrontations like the Stop the War marches, the now-familiar melees against the G20 or World Trade Organization and the rousing scenes of democracy in Occupy Wall Street all give the appearance of being highly significant, as if something were genuinely at stake.2 Yet nothing changed, and long-term victories were traded for a simple registration of discontent. To outside observers, it is often not even clear what the movements want, beyond expressing a generalised discontent with the world. The contemporary protest has become a melange of wild and varied demands. The 2009 G20 summit in London, for instance, featured protestors marching for issues that spanned from grandiose anti-capitalist stipulations to modest goals centred on more local issues. When demands can be discerned at all, they usually fail to articulate anything substantial. They are often nothing more than empty slogans - as meaningful as calling for world peace. In more recent struggles, the very idea of making demands has been questioned. The Occupy movement infamously struggled to articulate meaningful goals, worried that anything too substantial would be divisive.5 And a broad range of student occupations across the Western world has taken up the mantra of ‘no demands’ under the misguided belief that demanding nothing is a radical act.4 When asked what the ultimate upshot of these actions has been, participants differ between admitting to a general sense of futility and pointing to the radicalisation of those who took part. If we look at protests today as an exercise in public awareness, they appear to have had mixed success at best. Their messages are mangled by an unsympathetic media smitten by images of property destruction - assuming that the media even acknowledges a form of contention that has become increasingly repetitive and boring. Some argue that, rather than trying to achieve a certain end, these movements, protests and occupations in fact exist only for their own sake.5 The aim in this case is to achieve a certain transformation of the participants, and create a space outside of the usual operations of power. While there is a degree of truth to this, things like protest camps tend to remain ephemeral, small-scale and ultimately unable to challenge the larger structures of the neoliberal economic system. This is politics transmuted into pastime - politics-as-drug experience, perhaps - rather than anything capable of transforming society. Such protests are registered only in the minds of their participants, bypassing any transformation of social structures. While these efforts at radicalisation and awareness-raising are undoubtedly important to some degree, there still remains the question of exactly when these sequences might pay off. Is there a point at which a critical mass of consciousness-raising will be ready for action? Protests can build connections, encourage hope and remind people of their power. Yet, beyond these transient feelings, politics still demands the exercise of that power, lest these affective bonds go to waste. If we will not act after one of the largest crises of capitalism, then when? The emphasis on the affective aspects of protests plays into a broader trend that has come to privilege the affective as the site of real politics. Bodily, emotional and visceral elements come to replace and stymie (rather than complement and enhance) more abstract analysis. The contemporary landscape of social media, for example, is littered with the bitter fallout from an endless torrent of outrage and anger. Given the individualism of current social media platforms - premised on the maintenance of an online identity - it is perhaps no surprise to see online ‘politics’ tend towards the selfpresentation of moral purity. We are more concerned to appear right than to think about the conditions of political change. Yet these daily outrages pass as rapidly as they emerge, and we are soon on to the next vitriolic crusade. In other places, public demonstrations of empathy with those suffering replace more finely tuned analysis, resulting in hasty or misplaced action - or none at all. While politics always has a relationship to emotion and sensation (to hope or anger, fear or outrage), when taken as the primary mode of politics, these impulses can lead to deeply perverse results. In a famous example, 1985's Live Aid raised huge amounts of money for famine relief through a combination of heartstring-tugging imagery and emotionally manipulative celebrity-led events. The sense of emergency demanded urgent action, at the expense of thought. Yet the money raised actually extended the civil war causing the famine, by allowing rebel militias to use the food aid to support themselves.6 While viewers at home felt comforted they were doing something rather than nothing, a dispassionate analysis revealed that they had in fact contributed to the problem. These unintended outcomes become even more pervasive as the targets of action grow larger and more abstract. If politics without passion leads to cold-hearted, bureaucratic technocracy, then passion bereft of analysis risks becoming a libidinally driven surrogate for effective action. Politics comes to be about feelings of personal empowerment, masking an absence of strategic gains. Perhaps most depressing, even when movements have some successes, they are in the context of overwhelming losses. Residents across the UK, for example, have successfully mobilised in particular cases to stop the closure of local hospitals. Yet these real successes are overwhelmed by larger plans to gut and privatise the National Health Service. Similarly, recent anti-fracking movements have been able to stop test drilling in various localities - but governments nevertheless continue to search for shale gas resources and provide support for companies to do so.7 In the United States, various movements to stop evictions in the wake of the housing crisis have made real gains in terms of keeping people in their homes.8 Yet the perpetrators of the subprime mortgage debacle continue to reap the profits, waves of foreclosures continue to sweep across the country, and rents continue to surge across the urban world. Small successes - useful, no doubt, for instilling a sense of hope - nevertheless wither in the face of overwhelming losses. Even the most optimistic activist falters in the face of struggles that continue to fail. In other cases, well-intentioned projects like Rolling Jubilee strive to escape the spell of neoliberal common sense.9 The ostensibly radical aim of crowdsourcing money to pay the debts of the underprivileged means buying into a system of voluntary charity and redistribution, as well as accepting the legitimacy of the debt in the first place. In this respect, the initiative is one among a larger group of projects that act simply as crisis responses to the faltering of state services. These are survival mechanisms, not a desirable vision for the future. What can we conclude from all of this? The recent cycle of struggles has to be identified as one of overarching failure, despite a multitude of smallscale successes and moments of large-scale mobilisation. The question that any analysis of the left today must grapple with is simply: What has gone wrong? It is undeniable that heightened repression by states and the increased power of corporations have played a significant role in weakening the power of the left. Still, it remains debatable whether the repression faced by workers, the precarity of the masses and the power of capitalists is any greater than it was in the late nineteenth century. Workers then were still struggling for basic rights, often against states more than willing to use lethal violence against them.10 But whereas that period saw mass mobilisation, general strikes, militant labour and radical women’s organisations all achieving real and lasting successes, today is defined by their absence. The recent weakness of the left cannot simply be chalked up to increased state and capitalist repression: an honest reckoning must accept that problems also lie within the left. One key problem is a widespread and uncritical acceptance of what we call ‘folk-political’ thinking. (5-9)

(Ruth Wilson, Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and professor of geography in Earth and Environmental Sciences at The City University of New York, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation)

The careerist, particularist, and luxe modes waste precious intellectual resources and displace energy from where it is most needed. As such, they are to the current era what many institutional “reforms” such as assistant deans for race/gender relations, daycare centers, and ethnic and women’s studies programs were to colleges and universities in the late 1960s and early 1970s: cheap insurance against more expensively redressed claims that the urban university in the United States has, historically and systematically, underdeveloped the neighborhoods where the working poor live in the shadow of the ever-growing master’s house. In the exploitation of the culture of opposition, these modes tend to incorporate into the private sphere of intellectual property (books, conferences, centers) what Mike Davis insists should be the public production of public use values. Thus, it follows that these modes suffer, as they must, from theoretical sloppiness and political dishonesty at the heart of the enterprise. Political dishonesty, because to call one’s work oppositional is not enough. Theoretical sloppiness, because to speak in certain categories—such as “literary geniuses” (Gates) or “cultural capital” (Baker)—is to couple one’s work with that of primary definers such as 1992 Nobel Laureate economist Gary Becker. These definers use such categories to explain away historically specific differentiation (the achievements of racism, machismo, and exploitation) through an appeal to cultural difference alleged to inhere in the oppressed more naturally and less alienably than, say, freedom.

(Ruth Wilson, Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and professor of geography in Earth and Environmental Sciences at The City University of New York, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation)

The third, and most distressing, category is that of luxury production—what Canadian intellectual Melissa Freedman calls insider trading for the advantaged elites of theory high or low. There is certain usefulness in figuring out just how an expressive cultural form does its work. However, in the rush to understand, a theoretical eclecticism, mingled with an institutionally encouraged tendency to substitute adequate abstraction for adequate theory, produces work which readers become servants of rather than work which serves readers. The point is not that reading must always seem transparent and require neither dictionary nor sustained contemplation. Nor is it that complexity is itself bad, nonproductive, or coopted by definition. Nothing could be further from the truth. But what has happened is that an inward-looking practice is effectively closed off, a dead end of all the labors that produced it—perhaps like a diamond forever, but so what, and at what human costs? In universities over the past generation or so, theory has assumed pride of place in most of the traditional academic disciplines—especially in the humanities—and, by extension, in the oppositional studies corners as well. In fact, it is quite possible that the theoretical urgency running through oppositional studies has been sluiced back to the mainstream, refreshing stagnant waters there. In any event, in the United States, “theory,” its own discipline and end, pays. Somewhere along the way, intellectuals are so overwhelmed by discovering the production of knowledge that they have forgotten about “just knowing something,” as Barbara Harlow puts it.

(Alex,EuropeanStudies@King’s, A Debate between John Holloway and Alex Callinicos: “Can we change the world without taking power?” World Social Forum, Porto Alegre (27 January 2005) https://web.archive.org/web/20110726172523/http://archive.iire.org/pamphlet_nsf_2006.pdf )

Whatever our differences, John and I stand for changing the world through a process of self-emancipation, where there aren’t leaders who tell people what to do but rather people who collectively liberate themselves. I admire the honesty, clarity and consistency of John’s work, which is evident in his presentation today. But I also have to be honest and say that I find the ideal of changing the world without taking power ultimately self-refuting. I agree with John about uncertainty. There are lots of things we cannot know. But one thing I am certain about. That is that it is impossible to change the world without addressing and solving the question of political power. I absolutely sympathise with one of the impulses behind the slogan ‘Change the world without taking power’. Among a lot of the traditions on the left worldwide there has been what has been called ‘socialism from above’. Whether it is a Communist party with Stalinist traditions or a social democratic party like the Workers Party in Brazil today, it involves the idea that the party changes things for you and everyone else remains passive. The political tradition I stand in is a very different one. It is that of socialism from below summed up in Marx’s definition of socialism as the self-emancipation of the working class. Socialism is about the oppressed and exploited of the world effectively liberating themselves. My fundamental difference with John is that I believe this process of self-emancipation requires us to confront and overthrow the existing state and replacing it with a radically different form of state power. John invites us essentially to turn our backs on the state. He says that we should carry out what he calls an ‘interstitial’ revolution. It’s been summed up by other thinkers sharing the same ideas as John as life despite capitalism. We should all try and cultivate our autonomous gardens despite the horrors of capitalism. The trouble is that the state won’t leave us alone and that is because capitalism itself, the system that different states sustain, won’t leave us alone. Capitalism today is invading the gardens of the world to carve them up and turn them into branches of agribusiness or suburban speculation and won’t leave us alone. We cannot ignore the state, because the state is the most concentrated single form of capitalist power. This means strategically we have to be against the state, to pursue the revolution against the state. Does this mean we ignore the existing state and do not ever put demands on the capitalist state? No. The existing capitalist states try to legitimise themselves to win the consent of those they oppress and exploit. This means that if we organise effectively, we can force reforms out of capitalism. Also, if we ignore the state, that means we will be indifferent to struggles over privatisation. For example, at the minute George Bush wants to privatise the pensions system in the US. Do we say we don’t care about that because the social security system in the US is organised by the state? I think, no. Finally, many workers these days are employed by the state. Part of the process of privatisation means those employees of private companies replace these workers. Often that means the service to the public is worse and the conditions and wages of those employed by those companies get worse. But if we are not indifferent to the state, that does not mean we can rely on it. In the long run capitalism and the state which seeks to sustain it will seek to take back any reforms it concedes temporarily. That is what they are seeking to do at the present time. Moreover, as John has highlighted, the state is a hierarchical organisation which organises violence to keep the mass of society subordinated. This means we cannot simply try to seize the existing state. If we seize the existing state, in the end, at the worst we will get Stalin, at best we will get someone like Lula or Mbeki in South Africa who comes out of a mass movement which seeks to change the world but ends up administering things for capitalism. What’s the alternative then? It is to build up a movement that is powerful and focused enough to break the existing forms of state power and institute radically different and radically democratic forms of state power. In other words, there has to be a revolution which is not a party taking state power by seizing the existing state, but the oppressed and exploited-above all workers-who break the existing state and in the process of doing so create radically new and democratic forms of power in order to manage society for themselves. This alternative is not just a fantasy that I’ve spun out of my head. If we look at the history of the working class movement over the last 150 years, again and again workers have created new ways of organising in order to wage mass struggles effectively. These have been much more democratic, much more subject to the control of the workers themselves. In order to wage their struggles, they have created delegate structures that break down the hierarchy that John talks about. And in doing so they have created new forms of political power, even if they don’t know it. There are many examples: the soviets in the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 are the most famous examples; there were the workers’ and soldiers’ councils that were formed in the German Revolution of 1918-20; right up to the cordones that were formed in Chile in 1972-73 at the height of the struggles under the Popular Unity government of Allende. There are many other examples of mass popular organisation that represent a new sort of political power. The important thing about these forms of organisation, whatever the intentions that led to their formation, is that they have the capacity to challenge and break the existing state and institute new forms of power. We are not saying, as John was suggesting, ‘Wait for the revolution.’ But any struggles that begin to build towards self-organisation are pointing the way towards the way a future non-capitalist, socialist, society can be organised. The problem is that for any movement towards self-organisation to succeed in breaking the power of capital, there has to be a moment of concentration and centralisation. You can’t deal with the concentrated power of capital-the state and the multinational corporations-without the movements themselves becoming focused to confront the power of those corporations directly. John will say, ‘When you talk about centralisation and concentration, you are returning to the old ways of organising, you are beginning to organise in a way that reproduces the centralised and hierarchical structures of the existing state.’ I agree it isn’t easy. John was very honest and talked about the difficulties with his strategic conception, and I agree there are difficulties with the approach I am defending. Combining centralisation with self-organisation is not easy. But without a degree of centralisation we will be defeated. If we simply have fragmented and decentralised and localised activity, all cultivating our autonomous gardens, capital can isolate us and destroy or incorporate us piece by piece. And we cannot address problems like climate change unless we have the capacity to coordinate and, to a degree, to centralise for global change. We cannot reduce CO2 emissions to the necessary level without global coordination. We will not achieve the world we want to see if we simply rely on the fragment and the local. This is related to the question of parties. John is critical of the party as a form of organisation. He says it reproduces the hierarchical structures of the existing state. But if we look at our movement, there are parties within the movement-that is, there are ideologically organised currents which have in their different ways a total strategic view of the transformation of society. In that sense of party, John and the people who think like him are as much a party within the different movements as are the Workers Party and the PSOL in Brazil,1 or the Socialist Workers Party in Britain. 1: The new left wing party formed by those expelled from the Workers Party. People who organise such a current can say they are not a party, but it is a form of self-deception. Recognising the role parties can play in the movements can lead to a more honest and open articulation of different strategies and visions for change. Parties can contribute to the development of a movement that is both self-organised and sufficiently coherent to take on the task of social transformation, of revolution. My ideal in this respect is the one articulated by the great Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci. He talked about the dialectical interaction between the moment of centralisation represented by the parties and the self-organised impulse from the movement which is the fundamental driving force of revolution. To sum up: First of all we cannot avoid the question of the state and political power. It is a delusion to believe we can avoid it. The critical question is who takes power and how. If it is simply a question of a party taking control of the existing state by whatever means, then it is absolutely true that will be a change that simply reproduces the existing relations of domination. But the conception of a self-organised working class seizing power to institute new forms of political organisation and state organisation along with all the other oppressed and exploited groups changes the question. Revolution then becomes a process of self-emancipation which starts here and now, in the way we organise resistance to capitalism, and culminates when we create a selforganised society, and capitalism and all the oppression associated with it becomes simply a bad memory.

(Gregory, Adjunct Prof. of Philosophy @Baruch and Michael J. , Associate prof. Political Theory @William Patterson http://logosjournal.com/2015/thompson-zucker/)

These four elements of the new radical intellectuals and the movements they have influenced are in direct contradiction to the rational radicalism that we implicitly espouse here. On our reading, there is not only a theoretical but also a deeply political difference between what these theorists search for and the Enlightenment-inspired radical view of a social order marked by solidarity around common goods, civic virtue oriented toward the defense of the public welfare, well-ordered political institutions with public purpose as their aim, constitutionalism that secures individual as well as economic rights, and the democratization of social and economic life as basic criteria for social justice. The alternative move, marked by identity politics, anti-statism, direct and participatory democracy, and neo-anarchism, has succeeded in fragmenting and marginalizing left movements and politics. Perhaps even worse, these “new movements” lack any real constituency, have scarcely any concrete political demands, and are purposefully self-alienated from the levers of real power and policy.[22] As a result, a real, politically consequential left has withered. The political culture of western democracies are marked more by a general value-consensus around liberal-capitalism than any time since the late 1950s. Movements that once saw the true mechanisms of politics – the need to influence parties, to push for legislative reform, to insist on the expansion of the democratization of economic and political institutions, to forge ideologies that were rooted in national culture – have simply disappeared. Nietzsche’s insistence that aesthetics replace the political has now become manifest in this new radicalism. Now, so-called academic “radicals” can be seen to have betrayed politics: they dismiss the reality of the political process and instead call for an obscure and abstract “resistance.” Perhaps the basic thesis can be laid out that where there is no strong labor movement, there can be no robust left politics, and even less relevant left political theory. But whatever the explanation for the increased irrationalism of current left theory, we believe that these intellectuals should be held accountable for the ideas they promulgate. Staggering is the extent to which these radical mandarins self-confidently strut their stuff, even as political defeats mount for leftist politics with the increasing victory of “right to work” legislation, the dismantling of environmental protections, the increased power of corporate interests, and an expanding wealth and income divide. We take seriously the notion that there is a responsibility for intellectuals to debate and critique ideas that have public consequence; the effect of these thinkers and their ideas on the left we see as a primary concern. As Christopher Lasch once remarked, “Cultural radicalism has become so fashionable, and so pernicious in the support it unwittingly provides for the status quo, that any criticism of contemporary society that hopes to get beneath the surface has to criticize, at the same time, much of what currently goes under the name of radicalism.”[23] With this in mind, reviving the tradition of rational progressive politics can be saved only once these new radicals and their approaches have been interrogated and critiqued. Confronting the fashionable nonsense of the present requires that these their ideas be scrutinized against the more rationalist claims that have given shape to radical and critical thought since the Enlightenment, not to mention the common sense that the thinkers we address have sought to evade. We believe that the success of these thinkers and ideas marks a real and disturbing departure from the more rationalist, more realist understanding of progressive and radical politics that marked the more successful movements of the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century.

(Introduction to Anarchist Communism https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anarchist-federation-introduction-to-anarchist-communism#toc13 , April)

The other typiIntroduction to Anarchist Communismcal approach to prefigurative politics is trying to build dual power. This means trying to build organisations in the here and now that will eventually replace capitalism. These can be anything from cooperatives of various kinds that organise to produce or to sell some product in a non-hierarchical way, to mass revolutionary unions that aim to take over the running of industry. The idea is that by building organisations through which people run their own lives now, a point of ‘dual power’ can be reached. This is a situation where both capitalism and potential alternatives exist side by side, where there are two systems of economic, social and political organisation in direct competition with each other. For people who argue this way, this is how revolution happens. People build an alternative which increasing numbers of people join until it is strong enough to confront capitalism directly and replace it. There are a number of different approaches to dual power strategies. Some see themselves as providing examples that can be taken up by other people and perhaps eventually become state policy. Things like the Transition Towns movement at the moment, or various alternative education movements work in this way. These are rarely very confrontational about their ideas and see themselves as reformist rather than revolutionary. They do, however, see the need to build an alternative base of power outside the state and capitalism. Others seek to build entire alternative economies through cooperatives, credit unions, local trading systems (LETS schemes as they are often called) and the like. These, they argue, could eventually reach the point where many people are in effect living outside the capitalist economy. People in this tradition often, but not always, describe themselves as mutualist. A variation on this idea sees building alternative centres of political rather than economic power as the key. There are two main traditions here. Some focus on building community assemblies to take local decisions and sometimes seek to take over local town halls and council chambers through elections. These people often, but again not always, describe themselves as municipalist. Others focus on building revolutionary trade unions which will confront management in the workplace to get immediate gains. They will also just as importantly be run by direct democracy, giving workers experience of taking decisions and organising. These unions are then seen as able to take over industry in its entirety replacing capitalism as they do so. This is usually described as syndicalism. All these approaches, and they often work in combination, see themselves as building a political and economic alternative to capitalism right under its nose. They argue that these alternatives are able to grow to the point where either capitalism withers away or there is a confrontation between the two systems which leads to revolution and the destruction of capitalism. There are many positive things about these approaches. They encourage self organisation and direct action by ordinary people. They provide important lessons in collective working and experience of direct democracy for those involved. The AF does not reject any of these approaches out of hand and members often involve themselves in this kind of project. However, there are important weaknesses in these approaches that limit their usefulness. These kinds of projects are highly vulnerable to attacks by the state. Laws can be passed that make most cooperatives illegal or at least very difficult to set up. Community assemblies can be denied resources, or even attacked directly by the police and the army. People who pursue dual power strategies are often very over-optimistic about their ability to avoid repression. Capitalism and the state tend to attack any threat sooner rather than later. It is not, however, direct attacks by the state that are the biggest problem with dual power strategies. The biggest problem is the risk of co-option. What this means is that movements and organisations which start out trying to provide an alternative are often ‘captured’ by capitalism. They become part of it rather than an alternative, helping capitalism to manage people’s exploitation rather than challenging it. For example, cooperatives often become employers in their own right, with full cooperative members becoming managers and their new employees exploited workers like any others. Community groups are approached by local councils, given funding and access to some power and end up administering the council policies they set out to oppose. Housing co-ops become landlords, credit unions become banks (building societies in the UK started out as community schemes), syndicalist unions negotiate with management and crack down on wildcat strikes. Ordinary people who start out trying to build alternatives end up becoming the thing they hate.