Alt fails – markets are societally ingrained, and even if not, the alt certainly can’t solve

It is quite true that it is the system of global capitalism or the market that has created our climate problems (though, as Jared Diamond shows in Collapse, other systems of production have also produced devastating climate problems). In its insistence on profit and expansion in each economic quarter, markets as currently structured provide no brakes for environmental destructive actions. The system is itself pathological.

However, pointing this out and deriding market based solutions doesn’t get us very far. In fact, such a response to proposed market-based solutions is downright dangerous and irresponsible. The fact of the matter is that 1) we currently live in a market based world, 2) there is not, in the foreseeable future an alternative system on the horizon, and 3), above all, we need to do something now. We can’t afford to reject interventions simply because they don’t meet our ideal conceptions of how things should be. We have to work with the world that is here, not the one that we would like to be here. And here it’s crucial to note that pointing this out does not entail that we shouldn’t work for producing that other world. It just means that we have to grapple with the world that is actually there before us.

It pains me to write this post because I remember, with great bitterness, the diatribes hardcore Obama supporters leveled against legitimate leftist criticisms on the grounds that these critics were completely unrealistic idealists who, in their demand for “purity”, were asking for “ponies and unicorns”. This rejoinder always seemed to ignore that words have power and that Obama, through his profound power of rhetoric, had, at least the power to shift public debates and frames, opening a path to making new forms of policy and new priorities possible. The tragedy was that he didn’t use that power, though he has gotten better.

I do not wish to denounce others and dismiss their claims on these sorts of grounds. As a Marxist anarchists, I do believe that we should fight for the creation of an alternative hominid ecology or social world. I think that the call to commit and fight, to put alternatives on the table, has been one of the most powerful contributions of thinkers like Zizek and Badiou. If we don’t commit and fight for alternatives those alternatives will never appear in the world. Nonetheless, we still have to grapple with the world we find ourselves in. And it is here, in my encounters with some Militant Marxists, that I sometimes find it difficult to avoid the conclusion that they are unintentionally aiding and abetting the very things they claim to be fighting. In their refusal to become impure, to work with situations or assemblages as we find them, to sully their hands, they end up reproducing the very system they wish to topple and change. Narcissistically they get to sit there, smug in their superiority and purity, while everything continues as it did before because they’ve refused to become politicians or engage in the difficult concrete work of assembling human and nonhuman actors to render another world possible. As a consequence, they occupy the position of Hegel’s beautiful soul that denounces the horrors of the world, celebrate the beauty of their soul, while depending on those horrors of the world to sustain their own position.

To engage in politics is to engage in networks or ecologies of relations between humans and nonhumans. To engage in ecologies is to descend into networks of causal relations and feedback loops that you cannot completely master and that will modify your own commitments and actions. But there’s no other way, there’s no way around this, and we do need to act now.