by Charles Bernstein

N.B.: In Lyric Shame (Harvard University Press, 2014), Gillian White shames those who question the jargon of authenticity in lyric poetry. White claims that active skepticism toward Romantic Ideology is a form of shaming. White fights this phantom shame with her critical shaming. See Lytle Shaw, “Framing the Lyric” in American Literary History, 2016.

 

 

 

by Pieter Lemmens and Yuk Hui

‘You really take no account of what happens to us. When I talk to young people of my generation, who are about two or three years older or younger than me, they all say the same: we no longer have the dream to found a family, to have children, or a profession, or ideals, like you did when you were teenagers. That’s all over, because we are sure that we will be the last generation, or one of the last, before the end’

The Shock of the Anthropocene

In the above quote from the novel L’Effondrement du temps by the anonymous writer collective L’impansable, the fifteen year-old Florian addresses the current generation of politicians and more generally of adults responsible for our world and its future (L’impansable 2006). The French philosopher Bernard Stiegler has recently quoted this statement in many of his talks and it also features prominently in his new book Dans la disruption. Comment ne pas devenir fou? (In the disruption – how not to become mad? Stiegler 2016). Florian’s remark reveals a strong sense of melancholia about the arrival of the end. For Stiegler, this is not simply rhetoric. In an interview with the French Newspaper Le Monde on 19 November 2015, shortly after the Paris attacks, Stiegler confesses that “I can no longer sleep during the night, not because of the terrorists but because of worries that my children will no longer have any future” (Stiegler 2015a). What makes Stiegler so sad, and even so pessimistic about the current situation?

As we see it, Stiegler is not exaggerating, but rather telling the truth. It is true that he has been accused of being a pessimist, because of his statements on the future of work, automation, editorialisation, etc. The general excitement about technological developments may give the impression that the world is moving towards a brighter posthumanist or transhumanist future. Many scholars working on technology tend to be easily satisfied with the phenomena emerging out of the new digital infrastructures and hence disregard a fierce critique of technology as a gesture of a Neo-Frankfurt School. Stiegler calls this attitude dénégation (denial). In his new book, Stiegler puts Florian’s accusation on a par with the shocking revelations of global “whistleblowers” like Edward Snowden, Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning and Julian Assange and he characterizes it as a parrhesia in the sense made famous by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, i.e., as a “frank and free” saying things as they are, or in other words a frank and courageous speaking of the truth. In this case, the truth of our time is a truth to which, according to Stiegler, virtually everyone prefers to close their eyes since it is too traumatic, inconceivable and appalling. It speaks not just about the possible but even the rather likely and imminent end of humanity, or at least of human civilization as we know it.

What is this truth of our time? Perhaps one can start with its causes, which are multiple: the global climate and ecological crisis, resource depletion, military development, digital industrialization and a runaway consumerism accelerating daily through the intense exploitation of people’s attention and desires – there is a whole range of phenomena that seem to inevitably lead towards an apocalyptic end. If we are not able to reverse these destructive trends, humanity may soon confront its own extinction. The principal task and first duty of philosophy today, according to Stiegler, is to give a response to the parrhesia of Florian. Let’s start by introducing the subject of the Anthropocene and the scientific debates related to it. Many climate scientists[1] talk about a large-scale shift imminent in the Earth’s biosphere whose consequences will be unpredictable but in all likelihood catastrophic, especially if nations do not get together quickly to steer the “anthropogenic impacts” on the biosphere in a more beneficial direction. This mega- or ultra-wicked problem (as it is called in policy circles) is arguably the essence as well as the urgency of what has recently become known as the “Anthropocene”. This term was introduced in 2000 by the Dutch climate scientist and atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen to identify the new geological era that in his view we have entered at least since the Industrial Revolution in the late 18^th century (Crutzen 2002). As his now widely accepted hypothesis stated, “the human” (anthropos in Greek) or at least a certain part of humanity has become the most important geological (f)actor, having more impact on the state of the biosphere than all natural factors together. The human has thereby become de facto and willy-nilly responsible for the biosphere and by implication for its own future fate.

The so-called “great acceleration” that started after World War II is considered to be responsible for finally bringing about what French historians Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz have called “the shock of the Anthropocene” (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016): the world-wide dawning of humanity’s largely destructive impact on its own planetary life-support system. The predictions of the consequences of this for humanity in the short and long run vary, but even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), known to represent the rather cautious mainstream view, has been forced to continually adjust its forecasts to more gloomy outcomes. The most extreme predictions, like those of the American ecologist Guy McPherson, foresee a near-term human extinction event within three decades (McPherson 2013).

We would like to address the Anthropocene from both a philosophical and a political perspective. The former concerns the existence and responsibility of humans; the latter the political struggle that we must amplify. The term Anthropocene is ambivalent, since on the one hand, it leads to the illusion that man is back in the center, as one of the scientific researchers remarked during a recent conference entitled “How to think the Anthropocene?[2]”. The researcher proudly stated for the first time after the Copernican revolution, “man” has rediscovered her/his centrality. On the other hand, this revolution is responsible for global warming, the widespread destruction of ecosystems and the alarming loss of biodiversity that some authors (like Elizabeth Kolbert) have called the “sixth mass extinction”, caused this time by human beings themselves (Kolbert 2014). In other words, if it is responsible for putting “man” back in the center, it might also lead to her/his destruction.

But what does this “geological event” of the Anthropocene really mean? Some geologists, or authors who are aligned with the thinking of “deep time”, see the Anthropocene as an insignificant event in comparison to the hundreds of millions years of geological history. The earth is in a constant process of destruction and reconstruction, the extinction of a species is one of those contingent events that carry no significance to the life of the earth. We may want to call this attitude, exemplified for instance in the work of the Dutch geophysiologist Peter Westbroek, geo-centrism or geo-reductionism (Westbroek 1992). The problem is not that such authors are wrong concerning earth science, but rather that they are right; in fact, they are so correct about it that they don’t see the problem.

Marxist authors like Jason Moore, Maurizio Lazzarato and Christian Parenti argue that we should talk about the Capitalocene instead of the Anthropocene since it is not so much “the human” as the capitalist mode of production that is to be held responsible for the current devastation and exhaustion of the Earth’s biosphere (Moore 2016). Like Slavoj Žižek, they promote a more class-oriented view, re-interpreting the Anthropocene as the result of capitalism’s way of organizing nature in the case of Moore, who situates the Anthropocene’s  beginning not in the 18^th century but in the long 16^th century of primitive accumulation and the large-scale land-grabbing by budding capitalists known as the “enclosure of the commons” (Moore 2015). McKenzie Wark, another Marxist author who is nonetheless critical about the notion of the capitalocene (Wark 2015a), develops a “labor perspective” on the epic challenge of the Anthropocene, one that is inspired by the work of early Soviet authors Alexander Bogdanov and Andrey Platonov and feminist theorist Donna Haraway and Californian writer Kim Stanley Robinson (Wark 2015b).

Many authors contest the term Anthropocene also because it suggests the existence of one unitary subject, “the human” or “humanity”, which would be responsible for the current crisis. However, as the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk jokingly remarked in a recent public debate with Stiegler in Nijmegen in the Netherlands on the 27^th of June (Sloterdijk and Stiegler 2016), sending an e-mail to humanity@planet.earth will inevitably yield a delivery failure message: “the human” or “humanity” does not exist. It is also obvious that some parts of humanity, like those belonging to the rich and affluent societies of the West, are much more “guilty” than, say, those fractions who live in the so-called developing world, the cruel fact being that the latter are generally much more affected by the devastating consequences of climate change than the former (in India for instance temperatures have been rising to a sweltering 51 degrees Celsius and many people are expected to die due to extreme heat and drought) (Wyke 2016).

In his 1979 book The Principle of Responsibility, the German philosopher Hans Jonas already warned for the danger of humanity’s self-destruction due to its immense technological power and ability to destroy the planet (Jonas 1985). Jonas called for a new ecological ethic of responsibility and thereby proved himself to be an Anthropocenic thinker avant la lettre. His book was published at the onset of the so-called neoliberal revolution which swept away virtually every environmental policy that had gradually gained more support in the seventies and unleashed a global economic world war in the context of which we are all forced to compete against each-other—a war that is on a fatal collision course with the earthly ecosystem. The big question is whether, and how, we can reverse this process: how we can transform our hugely destructive impact on the earth into a more constructive and responsible one in order to avert the global catastrophe of which the current global crisis is only the prelude? As geobiologist Peter Ward put it in his book The Medea Hypothesis: ‘We are in a box. Ultimately it is a lethal box, a gas chamber or fryer, depending on how things work out. If we are to survive as a species, we will have to do a Houdini act’ (Ward 2015: 141).

Two Proposals for a Reversal: Neganthropocene and Co-immunization

What could be the response to the Anthropocene besides emphasizing responsibility? Or is there a more primary question still: who is responsible for what? Let us look at the diagnoses of two already mentioned thinkers who have both thought extensively about the human-technology relationship in recent decades: Peter Sloterdijk and Bernard Stiegler. Both offer some insights not only into the technological but also the historical and political, and even anthropological problem of the “shock of the Anthropocene”, which could be fundamentally understood as the consequence of neoliberal globalization of technology and capital.

Sloterdijk, who calls himself a “leftist conservative”, is gaining increased attention in the Anglophone world yet is still a relatively marginal figure in it (unlike many of his continental colleagues of the same age and stature). His philosophical perspective is decidedly Nietzschean yet he is also very much influenced by Heidegger, Foucault, Deleuze, and Lacan, as well as the German tradition of philosophical anthropology (for example, Arnold Gehlen, Max Scheler and Helmuth Plessner). He became instantly famous in Europe in 1983 with his explosive debut Critique of Cynical Reason in which he diagnosed the current Zeitgeist as one of “enlightened unhappy consciousness” (with obvious allusions to Hegel) and a systemic hyper-cynicism that he hoped to counter with a new form of non-intellectual, bodily, popular- plebeian, humorous-grotesque, dadaesque and explicitly low-brow “critique”, inspired mainly by the brilliantly shameless performances of Diogenes of Sinope. His was a “critique beyond critique” that he called “kynicism” (with a k) (Sloterdijk 1988).

While in this huge two-volume treatise Sloterdijk still presented himself as an heir of the tradition of critical theory of his principal teachers from the Frankfurt School, notably Adorno, Horkheimer and Bloch, he was clearly a very recalcitrant and ultimately rather unfaithful one. In his 1989 book Eurotaismus. Eine Kritik der politischen Kinetik, a thesis on the postmodern condition and its discontents, he largely exchanged the Frankfurt School for the “Freiburg School” and developed a Heidegger-inspired critique of modernity’s “total mobilization” in terms of a kinetic reinterpretation of the latter’s notion of releasement [Gelassenheit]. In the later chapters of this book he too proved himself to be an Anthropocenic thinker avant la lettre by pointing toward the fragility and finitude of the Earth as the base upon which human cultural-historical projects unfolded. He proclaimed that human culture would have to be increasingly responsible for its maintenance in the future, calling for a global ecological turn of the whole human endeavor (Sloterdijk 1989).

Yet it is only in his monumental Spheres trilogy from 1998-2004 (Sloterdijk 2004), a grand sphero-immunological reinterpretation of the evolution and history of humankind and all the religious and metaphysical systems it produced—in other words, a history that operates from the perspective of humans as self-immunizing creatures who are sphere-building, sphere-abiding and sphere-borne beings–, that Sloterdijk develops a philosophical anthropology that is able to fully account for the anthropocenic condition we are inescapably entering. In particular the post-holistic, plural spherology or polyspherology of co-isolationist co-existence that is developed in the third volume of Spheres titled Foams is eminently suited for considering the human condition in the age of the Anthropocene (Sloterdijk 2016a), as Sloterdijk’s friend Bruno Latour has justly remarked (Latour 2008).

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Bernard Stiegler started his academic career as a commentator of Martin Heidegger, more specifically on the question of technology in Heidegger’s thought. Unlike Sloterdijk, who takes the question of space and topology in Heidegger’s thought further and has suggested “Being and Space” as an alternative title for his Spheres-project, Stiegler’s work centers on the question of time and time’s relation to technology through what he calls tertiary retention, a notion that completes the circle of Husserl’s theory of retentions and protentions (Stiegler 1998). The tertiary retention is the technically captured trace as well as support of both primary retention (e.g. the melody that is retained in our mind) and secondary retention (e.g. the melody that we can recall tomorrow). For Stiegler the tertiary retention is a supplement as well as “exteriorization” of memory (in the words of French paleoanthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan) through which he attempts to re-read the history of European philosophy as a history of the suppression of the question of technics – as a response to Heidegger’s critique of the forgetting of the question of Being in Western metaphysics. The history of technology for Stiegler could be described as the history of grammatization, a term coined by the French historian and linguist Sylvain Auroux, in which the organic and inorganic organs are configured and reconfigured according to the progress of technological invention (e.g. alphabetic writing, analog writing, digital writing).

Stiegler, who became a philosopher when he was incarcerated in Toulouse for committing several armed bank robberies, is currently director of the Institute of Research and Innovation (IRI), an institute that he established in 2006 in the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and president of the lobby group ars industrialis. Best-known for his magnum opus Technics and Time, he has more recently dedicated himself to research on digital technologies as our new technical condition and he has developed what he calls a “general organology” (more on this below) to understand the effects on that condition of today’s consumerist capitalism (Stiegler 2010a). He has been a member of the national council for the digital in France. Stiegler’s politics consists in what he (following Plato and Derrida) calls the pharmacology of technology, namely the fact that technology is at the same time good and bad, remedy and poison. The politics of technology is to inhibit the toxicity in favor of the remedy. This also reveals his hope for the positive use of pharmakon as resistance against industrialization based on the exploitation of psycho-power, neuro-plastiticty and the capacity to take care of one’s self and of others (Stiegler 2010b).

Of course, the immediate decarbonization of our economies and a transformation to renewable energy sources should be our first imperative. It could also be the case, as some geologists suggest, that geo-engineering will solve some of the problems that those changes would also address (Steffen et al. 2011). Others propose so-called “third way technologies” for carbon capture to reduce the atmospheric burden of CO2 during the time that is needed for the transition to a carbon-free economy  (Flannery 2016). However, what we are now facing is much more than a geo-chemical problem; and indeed it would be naïve to believe that it is only a geological question. We are facing, rather, what Stiegler calls the “entropocene”: the becoming entropic (in the sense of a world-wide exhaustion and ruination) of the biosphere due to what he calls a generalized toxification of all the systems that make up the human habitat on this planet: economic, social, technical, psychological, financial, juridical, educational, etc. (Stiegler 2017). In his view, those systems are all conditioned by a technical milieu which has been massively annexed and exploited by the capitalist industry to promote an evermore nihilistic process of production and consumption that exclusively serves the goal of profit accumulation. Since the technical milieu also encompasses the Earth’s biosphere, this leads to a massive accumulation of entropy that has reached such a scale so as to profoundly disrupt the geochemical processes of the earth.

For Stiegler, humanity is an originally technical phenomenon that is made up of three different organ systems: the psychosomatic organs of human individuals; social organizations; and all kinds of technical organs (Stiegler 2014). Those three organ systems are intimately intertwined and evolve on the basis of changes in the technical organs. And these technical organs must be understood as compensations for an original lack of natural properties. Stiegler has developed the latter point with reference to the story that the sophist told in Plato’s Protagoras, in which the fire stolen by Prometheus is a compensation for the fault of Epimetheus, who forgot to give the human being any skill or property. Stiegler is critical of this compensation or what he also calls supplement. By taking up the concept of the pharmakon from Plato’s Phaedrus and Jacques Derrida’s “Plato’s Pharmacy” (Derrida 1981), he developed further what he calls a “pharmacology” of technology (Stiegler 2011). Technics are understood as pharmaka, i.e., both medicine and poison. New technologies, and one can think of the internet as a digital pharmakon, are initially always toxic and that is why they are in need of “therapies” which can turn the poison into a remedy. Politics, law, education, skill-based labor and professions are for Stiegler domains where such therapies can be developed (Stiegler 2013). Since technological innovation has been delegated totally to the market by neoliberalism and turned into a permanently accelerating process of “innovation for profit”, this therapeutic adoption of technology has become almost impossible, leaving only constant, frenetic, and increasingly blind adaptation. And this is for Stiegler the principal process behind the aggravation of the Anthropocene as entropocene.

An example that may allow readers to imagine how such an entropy is produced is the use of technical organs (e.g. social networks, smart phones, automations, drones, etc.) for marketing and consumerism, which consequently destroy the psycho-somatic organs, since they produce only a drive toward perpetual consumption and no longer cultivate desire and therapeutic investment in skills and objects –– one can think of the addiction to video games or the internet and how they lead to the collapse of established social organizations. That situation systematically diverts attention away from confronting our real situation on this planet. The restructuralization of the economy as exo-somatisation oriented around the digital attention economy, big data and what is called “algorithmic governance” are taking us ever further into the abyss of nihilism. And yet, the internet is potentially also the best instrument at hand for a collective care-taking of the Earth and its inhabitants on a global scale. In Stiegler’s For a New Critique of Political Economy (Stiegler 2010), one of the alternatives put forward is an “economy of contribution”, which proposes to develop technologies which serve the initiation of a new economy of real investment of desire and the fight against the drive-based economy of consumerism. If the drive-based economy ultimately leads to addiction, then the economy of contribution hopes to turn libido into investment. That conversion is fundamentally a question of care: taking care of oneself and others.

The entropocene marks the inability to construct such an economy of care and of libido. Instead, it leads and will continue to lead to the further spread of entropy. The anthropocene presents a global symptom, which cannot and must not be ignored as if it were simply a geological or a mere economical question. In 2015, the summer school of the Pharmakon academy–the philosophy school Stiegler started in 2010 in Epineuil in France–was dedicated to the “affirmation of a neganthropocene”. The neganthropocene argues for a new form of technological development that allows a so-called “bifurcation” – a radical change of direction in the sense of thermodynamics and seeks to produce qualitative differences for individuals as well as social groups. Recently, Stiegler has started a project with the Plaine Commune of Saint-Denis next to Paris to create what he calls a “truly smart city”, the realization of his philosophy for a new economy.

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Sloterdijk already provided a perceptive and prescient sketch of the global situation of humanity in the epoch of what is now called the Anthropocene in his 1989 treatise Eurotaoismus. Until the dawning of the planetary “limits to growth”, as the famous 1972 report on the discrepancy between global economic expansion and planetary resources issued by the Club of Rome was entitled, the Earth was conceived (and accordingly treated) by a modernizing and industrializing humanity exclusively as the backdrop and unlimited resource fund for its cultural-historical projects. The metaphysical and “antisymbiotic” logic that characterizes the historical drama of mobilization that is modernity is indifferent if not blind to the stage upon which it is enacted. For a humanity that aims to become “master” and possessor of nature, as Descartes’ famous phrase had it, the Earth is reduced to a servant and supplier of material and energetic resources (and it is today still overwhelmingly considered as such by politicians and economists in terms of the “ecosystem services” it provides). It is only when the play starts to ruin the stage, Sloterdijk wrote in Eurotaoismus, that the actors are forced to take another view of both the stage and of themselves. What was once called “nature” and conceived of as an ever reliant, productive, abundant and robust backdrop has been fatally implicated in the maelstrom of human productivism and consumerism – “enframed” by it, as Heidegger would have it – with the destruction of its habitability impending if humanity does not start taking care of it and make it an integral if not central part of its cultural concerns. Referring to a phrase of the late Heidegger, Sloterdijk writes that the Earth can for us no longer be the endlessly patient “building-carrying” one that she was for all of humanity before us. The continued existence of so-called “nature, which we have now uncovered as being just a small and fragile ‘film’ covering a planetary body, can no longer be entrusted to her own autarky (since she has been scientifically exposed and technologically exploited), but will become dependent on us humans” (Sloterdijk 1989). That realization also means the definitive end of any peace of mind in the cosmos, on which all human cultures until now have rested (Davis and Turpin 2015).

In the apocalyptic last chapter of his 2009 book You Must Change Your Life, Sloterdijk claims that the awareness of the fact that we cannot continue our current care-less lifestyles any longer but need to “change our lives” and start “taking care of the whole” is nowadays almost universally shared, forming the quintessence even of today’s Zeitgeist. Arguing that the global crisis shares many characteristics with the ancient God of monotheism, he speculates that this crisis will inevitably initiate, and will have to initiate, nothing less than a global immunological turn, i.e., a revolutionary transformation in the way humans construct and organize their immuno-spheric residence on the planet: “a new world-forming gesture” in terms of a new global project of sphere-construction, understood first of all as a transformation from local to global immunization strategies, from local protectionisms to a “protectionism of the whole” (Sloterdijk 2014a). This will require a “social tipping point” in the awareness, willingness and ability to act collectively as Earthlings.

A viable future for humanity on this planet can therefore only be conceived for Sloterdijk on the basis of constructing a “global co-immunity structure” or a “global immune-design”, infused by a spirit of “co-immunism”, based on the awareness of a shared ecological and immunological situation and the realization that this new situation, which is actually that of the Anthropocene, cannot be dealt with on the basis of the existing local techno-cultural resources only but needs a planet-wide “logic of cooperation” (Sloterdijk 2014a). The technological reversion suggested by Sloterdijk is one that he calls a homeotechnological turn, i.e., a turn from the traditional, largely contra-natural, dominating, Earth-ignoring and Earth-ignorant allotechnological paradigm to a co-natural, non-dominating and Earth-caring homeotechnological paradigm. That also means the reconstruction of the global technosphere from a machine of exploitation and violation of the planetary oikos to an engine that co-operates and co-produces with the Earth’s bio- and atmosphere, an idea that resonates much with Stiegler negentropic turn (Sloterdijk 2015). Like Stiegler, who sometimes tends to identify the anthropocene with Heidegger’s Gestell, i.e., re-interpreted as the Ereignis of the Industrial Revolution as the deployment of the thermodynamic machine (the entropic character of which was not perceived by Heidegger, anymore than he took account of the notion of entropy in his thinking of the physis), Sloterdijk also thinks of the homeotechnological revolution as a benign turn of the Gestell towards a global-ecological “housing” project (Gehäuse) (Sloterdijk 2001).

In a lecture given at the climate conference in Kopenhagen in December 2009, Sloterdijk suggests that a homeotechnological conversion of the human noosphere and technosphere around the Earth, and thus of the institution of a co-operative and co-productive relation of both anthropospheres with the biosphere, might eventually lead to the explication or unconcealing – here meant in the quasi-Heideggerian sense of the term – of a “hybrid-Earth” that is capable of much more than we can now imagine from our still allotechnologically programmed perspective, i.e., a homeotechnologized Earth whose capacities might very well be multiplied to an unimaginable extent (Sloterdijk 2015).

Applying Spinoza’s famous dictum (from his Ethica) that “Nobody knows what a body can do” to the body of the Earth, Sloterdijk makes the wager that a homeotechnological turn of our immuno-spheropoietic being-on-the-planet forms our best and most hopeful answer to the challenge of the anthropocene, thereby referring to the bold ideas of the famous American architect Richard Buckminster Fuller, whose notion of Spaceship Earth as expounded in his 1968 book Operation Manual for Spaceship Earth has had a decisive influence on Sloterdijk’s sphero-immunological perception of the global ecological crisis and the anthropocene (Sloterdijk 2015, 108-9).

As Sloterdijk already emphasizes in the final section of his 1993 book Weltfremdheit, such a global co-immunization project could very well prove to be a challenge that is too big for the anthropos, that is to say: as it currently exists (Sloterdijk 1993). Yet if there is one over-arching insight that runs through all of Sloterdijk’s onto-anthropological reflections, it is that humans are those beings that are always confronted with problems that are far too big for them but that they nevertheless cannot avoid dealing with. This structural burdening with what the tragic Greeks called ta megala, the “big things”, which puts human beings under permanent “growth stress” and/or “format stress” – today unfolding as “planetarization stress” (Sloterdijk 1995) – is what anthropogenesis as hominization and coming-into-the-world through sphero-poietic expansion is all about. And philosophy’s inaugural task is to be the birth-helper of this process of uncanny coming-into-the world (Sloterdijk 1993).

If the human matures by increasing his awareness and responsibility through confrontations with the “big things”, the anthropocenic challenge of creating a global, i.e., planetary co-immunity structure will probably make clear for the very first time, and to all those involved, what “growing up” in its most general sense truly means for humanity (Sloterdijk 1993). Although the anthropos charged with responsibility is still “below the age of maturity” today (Sloterdijk 2015), the challenge of the anthropocene forces him, and provides him with the chance, to assume and acquire the proper maturity.

Although he never gets very specific about the details, Sloterdijk claims that the anthropocene in this sense requires an entirely new, still to be invented mode of “big politics”, one that he designated as “hyperpolitics” in a book entitled Im selben Boot. Versuch über die Hyperpolitik (In the same boat. An Essay on Hyperpolitics) from 1995 that is, like many other books from that period, a preliminary sketch for the Spheres project (Sloterdijk 195). After the “paleopolitics” as the “miracle of the repetition of humans by humans” characteristic of pre-sedentary, pre-agricultural societies, and the “classic politics” of agriculture-based cities and nation-states as the perpetuation of that miracle in larger formats, today’s expansion of humans’ spheropoiesis toward the global, forcing them to live together in even larger formats, calls for a hyperpolitics, i.e., a global “state-athletics” for which there are no traditional examples at hand and for which the existing modes of “national-egoism” politics in fact only act as blockades. As in 1995, we can still observe a huge disproportion between the forces that are necessary and the weaknesses that are available and it seems still all too obvious that “creating jobs on the Titanic” continues to represent the pinnacle of current political intelligence (although piling up debts to continue unbridled consumption is today’s preferred policy). And Sloterdijk’s spot-on remark after the failed Copenhagen climate summit of 2009, that citizens all over the globe should safeguard themselves from their own governments, seems still all too valid after the 2015 Paris summit.

The Herculean, currently impossible task for a coming hyperpolitics is to transform today’s “monster-international of end-users” or the hypermass of “last men with no return” into a global solidarity collective that takes care again of itself and the world and understands itself as a link between its ancestors and its offspring and not egoistically as the exclusive end-user of itself and its own life chances, an important theme Sloterdijk extensively elaborated upon in his 2014 book Die schrecklichen Kinder der Neuzeit. Über das anti-genealogische Experiment der Moderne (The Terrible Children of Modernity. On the Anti-Genealogical Experiment of the Modern Age; Sloterdijk 2014b). As such, hyperpolitics is the first politics of last men and should be understood as the continuation of paleopolitics with other means and on a global scale.

Since human spheropoiesis has gone global and pretends to encompass the entire biosphere, the situation of humanity vis-à-vis the planet has reversed, as Swedish earth system scientist Johan Rockström proclaims, from a “small world, big planet” situation into a “big world, small planet” one (Rockström and Klum 2015). To preserve what he calls a “safe operating space for humanity” within the planetary boundaries, he argues that we are in need of a global governance of the earth system in order to reconnect human techno-cultural systems with the biosphere in a co-constructive fashion. There exists already a “Global Earth Observation System of Systems” (GEOSS), which tracks many key planetary boundary processes. Intelligent and democratic use of such a system might indeed usher in a “good anthropocene” beneficial to all inhabitants of the earth system. It could be one of the supports of the global immune system that is necessary for our collective survival as Sloterdijk claims. Yet it is also important to make sure that life in the anthropocene is not just about sur-vival. It should also be a “good life”, a “life worth living” in Stiegler’s expression.

But how can Sloterdijk’s polyspherology, which takes the visual image of bubbles, be prevented from becoming the soil for fascism? The current refugee problem seems to be the touchstone of the foam theory. In an interview with the German magazine Cicero early this year, Sloterdijk claims that “we haven’t learned the praise of border”, and “The Europeans will sooner or later develop an efficient common border policy. In the long run the territorial imperative prevails. Finally, there is no moral obligation to self-destruction” (Sloterdijk 2016b). For sure, borders define the interiority and exteriority of bubbles, and hence realize such polycosmology; however, they thereby also blur the line between fascism and co-existence. In what sense can we interpret further the concept of co-existence, which recently has appeared in many other works dealing with the anthropocene and ecological crisis? Co-existence implies first of all communication and coalition – a positive concept of immune system under the current pharmacological condition, which stands as the opposite of the Brexit. We will come back to the politics of co-existence later when we address the concept of the “internation” as an alternative political imaginary.

Dealing With the Apocalypse. A New Kind of Politics for the Anthropocene

Let us try to conclude by restating the classic question “what is to be done”? Recently, there has been a lot of discussion about the question of scale and the Anthropocene is a scale problem of the highest order. The well-known American writer Evgeny Morozov has stated in almost all of his recent speeches that there is in fact NO alternative to the current neoliberal model of Silicon Valley – you are “free to use and free to give your data”, because the “Silicon Valley ideology” is so powerful that no individual effort will ever be able to challenge it–only the intervention of a body like the European Union could have a substantial effect. However, he does not see this will happen. On the other hand, British accelerationists like Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams have argued that after Occupy Wallstreet, the resistances or “micropolitics” that continue to spring up everywhere (such as urban gardening or dumpster diving) are not able to “scale up” to really challenge capitalism (Srnicek and Williams 2013). They criticize the individualist moral of the anarchist as a self-limitation as revolutionary force, and therefore fall prey to the appropriation of capitalism (Srnicek and Williams 2016: 29-37). This leaves us in a situation of helplessness, and micropolitics becomes self-consolation par excellence. The authors proposed what they call accelerationist politics inspired by the cybersyn project in the socialist Chili of the early Seventies, namely a socialist appropriation of technology in order to construct what they called a “post-work” economy, which includes 1) full automation, 2) reduction of working week, 3) universal basic income and 4) diminishment of the work ethic (2016: 127). Except for the last point, which is very close to the anarchists, their vision can be superimposed on the agenda of the Chinese Communist Party, which is unfortunately built upon a rather simple if not naïve understanding of technology.

First of all, it still remains to be debated if previous forms of resistance are futile, especially when such claims are no more than pure intellectual activities. Indeed such claims seem like a revival of cynicism for intellectuals to stay in front of the computer and renounce direct actions on the street; and sometimes it seems even grotesque when some respond to such “impasse” by “fully appropriating” Facebook or Google, as if “high technology” has necessarily led to the illusionary “post-capitalism” in the sense of Paul Mason (Mason 2016). A more critical attitude towards the technological acceleration should be taken, which goes beyond the opposition between optimism and pessimism. Both proposals for the neguentropocene and co-immunization should be taken further as concrete political acts. There, realization can only be achieved by going back to the question of the local. Locality is central for both Stiegler and Sloterdijk in terms of resistance against global capitalism, and locality can only be archived through personal contacts and concrete projects, that seem further and further from the grand intellectual revolutionary plots. We don’t pretend to know what is to be done. However, for effectively confronting the Anthropocene, and responding to it in a systematic and scalable way, we would like to propose two points concerning the role of the state and the form of resistance.

If states want to avoid being liquidated by the neoliberal economy, they will have to assume responsibility. We all know that nation-states had no problem whatsoever with intervening after the financial crisis of 2008 when the European banks ran into trouble. It was a moment when European governments undeniably showed that they are still capable of doing things on a global scale – though in the wrong way – in stark contrast to Hardt and Negri’s thesis of the power of Empire and the withering-away of nation-states (Hardt and Negri 2000). It seems that the nation-state should be obliged to take the problem of Anthropocene seriously and act upon it – not just by “going green”, but also by seriously addressing what Stiegler diagnoses as the entropic becoming of our world. However, it is also undeniably true that national governments have become pawns in the hands of global oligarchies and that national sovereignty is de facto eliminated and replaced by the dictates of the financial markets, with the recent fate of Greece being the most pitiable example. How much hope can we still bestow to our governments? And indeed one should be skeptical about them; however at the moment, they are the only institutions besides of transnational enterprises, which can effectively mobilize resources for large-scale projects.

The anti-globalization movement in the late 20^th century and first decade of the new millennium has made popular the multitude, yet the silence of the anti-globalization movement in recent years means that the form of micropolitics or artistic gesture proposed by it is no longer effective for dealing with the Anthropocene. By the same token, we already know about the failure of the “third sector” of NGOs, which since the anti-globalization movement haven’t cast any new light on the future. We also know that the post-World War II institution of the United Nations, despite its innumerable programs, doesn’t have any real executive power. Surely one can imagine, as many have done, that in order to form a federal body more powerful than the United Nations, a third world war would have to break out – and if the Anthropocenic situation worsens, such a scenario is not at all unrealistic.

By way of conclusion, we want to gesture toward the possibility of establishing an “internation”, a concept developed by Marcel Mauss in 1920 and recently taken up by Stiegler to propose the constitution of a new form of public power that might be able to defy the forces of capital and guide humanity into another future than the barbaric and intolerable “no future” prescribed by neoliberalism’s TINA (“There is no alternative”) mantra (Stiegler 2015b). Mauss pronounced the article “Nation et internationalisme” in the colloquium “The Problem of Nationality” organized by the Aristotelian Society in London, in which he expressed the urgency that philosophers take an avant-garde approach to the question of nation and internation (Mauss 1920). The increasing economic interdependence after the first world war becomes a “défaut”, based on which Mauss proposed also a “moral interdependence” of mutual-aid as well as the reduction in sovereignty to reduce war. Stiegler took up Mauss’s notion of the internation recently in States of shock (2015b) and interpreted it through the lens of Simondon’s concept of individuation.

A nation for Stiegler is a project of “collective individuation” through the establishment of a res publica. Internation is a project that takes this process further in order to re-institutionalize the production and dissemination of knowledge in order to re-create the circuits of transindividuation in the sciences that are now dominated by the marketisation and commercialization of knowledge. Stiegler imagines this internation first of all as a project for academics and scholars more generally all over the world (what he calls “interscience”) to unite in resolutely refusing their recruitment in the global economic world war unleashed by neoliberalism and instead sign a global peace treaty, backed up by a new legislative body (Stiegler 2015b).

This should start the re-forging of the digital networks into tools for cooperation and care, and for the elevation of collective intelligence. De facto, this internation already exists (and has existed for a long time) in the form of collaborations among research institutes, schools and universities worldwide. However, the research funding strategies in the past decades in Europe (if not worldwide) have rigidified these collaborations and turned them into zombie-like dogmas. Political visions of researchers are always submitted to the hidden agenda of the market and commercial value (what is called the “valorization agenda”). There is no lack of awareness of this among academics but at the moment there is no effective strategy to act against the market hegemony. The formation of an internation could foster such a strategy. Yet it will have to become explicitly politicized in order to function as a catalyst for the construction of new forms of global socialization and cooperation that could usher in the neganthropocene and bring about a large-scale homeotechnological revolution in the sense of Sloterdijk. The only alternative would be to surrender to the brutal dictates of a consumerist capitalist innovation that will only produce more entropy, impotence and stupidity. In the words of Stiegler, we need to mobilize internation against disindividuation.

The creation of an internation has a meaning for our epoch, and indeed there is an urgency to do so, in view of the destructive nature of the anthropocene and the entropic becoming of the technological world. It is for sure not only the responsibility of intellectuals and universities, and it is for sure that a larger scale of association with sectors and groups outside of university is necessary, but it is also important to reflect on these at the level of locality and localization, according to different orders of magnitude. To pass into act is only a question of perception and action but also, and probably even more profoundly, a process of psychic and collective individuation, which doesn’t come naturally. It takes courage to create such a condition and such a quantum leap. Retrospectively, Mauss’ remark on intellectual courage can therefore still serve as a Mahnruf to contemporary intellectuals:

Why didn’t the philosophers take an avant-garde position on this? They understood it well as it is about founding the doctrine of democracy and nationalities. British and French were ahead of their time, and one shouldn’t forget Kant, Fichte. Why did they choose to stay at the back, and serve the vested interest? (Mauss 1920)

We would finally like to ask here, most likely in deviation from Stiegler’s own intentions, whether it would be possible to conceive of such an internation as an enabling strategy for what Antonio Negri and Judith Revel have called “the invention of the common” (Negri and Revel 2008), i.e. as an intermediate step toward the establishment of a “global commons” of knowledge and capabilities and ultimately a common global authority not only beyond the private but also beyond the public. This return to Negri does not mean that we are proposing to undermine the role of the state, which we have invoked earlier. On the contrary, if the global economy in the past decades has been running on the principle of privatization and marketization, as Slavoj Žižek has rightly argued (Žižek 2009), and if the recent triumph of Donald Trump as well as the Brexit signal a return to a conservative revolution founded on the strengthening of sovereignty and border control, “communization” will be a counter process against the struggling self-preservation of capitalism. In that case, the economy of the commons inscribed in the project of internation could become a vehicle for the creation of a truly global co-immunity structure, and a truly global engine of neguanthropy. But for this to be possible, there should first be a re-orientation of strategies in teaching, research and funding within universities.

References

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[1] See Barnosky et al. 2012.

[2] The event took place in Paris just before the COP 21 in November 2015 and was organized by Philippe Descola and Catherine Larrère.

Tina Lupton and Heiko Henkel

Here in the UK, Labour is looking frantically for the right candidate to unite the country.  But in many ways they have that candidate.  We wrote this as a speech that Corbyn could give now.  Would this be the platform we’d vote for?  Perhaps not––we wished heartily to see the UK stay in the EU––but many people would, and the availability of this position would move us beyond the impasse we currently face.

The Speech Corbyn Is Not Giving

I would not have called this referendum.  And although I thought we should have stayed IN and tried to reform the EU from the inside, I also knew that the chances of such reform were slim. You all saw that I was not a keen campaigner.  Now that it’s over, I can say that what held me back were the terms of that referendum:  Those who wanted to show Westminster the Red Card for its ruthless austerity policies were forced to join forces with those who sought to consolidate their power there.  Now that it’s over, I can also tell you that, unlike the engineers of that referendum, I am prepared to embrace its outcome. Let us rally together and take this unique opportunity to restore democratic power to the British people.

The EU has always been a problematic entity.  One of the great peacekeeping and redistribution institutions of the twentieth century, it has also prevented us from developing our own national agenda for equality.  By drawing on a cheap labour force, we’ve lost sight of the rights and strengths of our own workforce.  A common market has depleted the originality of our local industries.  An inflated and centralised bureaucracy has sapped our initiative and capacity for self-governance.  These are good reasons to leave, and even if they were not the ones that drove your vote, now is the time to own them. Those of you who ticked that box have created an opportunity; you who did not have been given one.

As we embark on reinventing the United Kingdom, we need to remember that we cannot simply go back.  We need also to remember that we can’t work alone.  There is urgent need for an inclusive project of a better kind than the EU has proved to be: one that will reach out to those within our still united nation, as well as those around Europe who have their own critiques of Brussels. Bearing in mind that the Scottish people have a constitutional right to refuse it, we must reach out our hand to them in these next months, asserting that we are in many ways better placed to share the SNP agenda than we were a week ago.  And we need to look internationally, to those other movements on behalf of working people in South Asia and Latin America.

Many of you voted, of course, in the belief that we needed to close borders: that Britain is too full.  It’s time to disassociate ourselves from the ugliest versions of this cry, lest we undermine respect for our own movement and introduce parallels with the worst moments in European history. However, we must recognise those who hold that agenda dear will need a place in the new government.  If I am elected as Prime Minister, it will be my job to hold another referendum––not one that undoes what we achieved last week, but one that allows you to vote for proportional representation.  It is only with proportional representation that we can create a legitimate place for those who today have no choice but to rally around UKIP to voice their demands.

Something extraordinary happened last Thursday.  People voted against what they were told was their own economic interest.  Whether or not this turns out to be the case, we must harness the energy that comes with knowing that such a vote is possible.  In days of strained environments, when the project of ever-increasing economic growth looks less viable than it ever has in human history, we have proved that people do not simply vote with their pockets; that united in the right way, we will vote for something else.  A new government must listen to this, must not assume that only money speaks to the people, and must see that those of you in Wales and Cornwall, places of extraordinary natural beauty, have a special role to play in a Britain of which me might be proud in the coming decades.  In partnership with the Green Party, we must acknowledge that the industries working for sustainable energy can as well be British as European.

With our exit from the EU––and make no mistake, I will urge that Article 50 is invoked as soon as humanly possible, for the sake of our friends in Europe as well as those of you who expressed this as your will––we face both long- and short-term projects.  The long-term one involves winning back those young voters, very many of whom feel betrayed by what happened last week, to a socialist project in Britain, the likes of which they have not seen in their lifetime.  We must make sure that they do not lose their opportunities to study and work abroad, or their will to return home.  In the short term, we must call and win a general election.  Your hard work of revolt against those currently in power will mean nothing if they inherit this result on their own behalf.  Division, at the party level and beyond, is precisely what serves the status quo. As long as we refuse to work with those elsewhere in Europe and the world, as long as we reject those who share our hopes for the future but who voted differently on this occasion, we won’t achieve the change we want and need. As long as we’re divided, the people in power will look and act as they’ve always done. Whether or not you chose this future, there is a chance right now to make it ours.

 

Dr. Christina Lupton is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.  

Heiko Henkel is a Visiting Lecturer at the London School of Economics.

 

 

Photo courtesy of ATTAC TV

by Jorge Amar and Scott Ferguson

No private character, however pure, no personal popularity, however great, can protect from the avenging wrath of an indignant people the man who will either declare that he is in favor of fastening the gold standard upon this people, or who is willing to surrender the right of self-government and place legislative control in the hands of foreign potentates and powers.

William Jennings Bryan, “Cross of Gold,” 1896

In the wake of Syriza’s disappointing challenge to the Troika’s punishing austerity politics in the Eurozone, leftists around the globe are now turning their eyes, and hopes, to Podemos in Spain. Podemos grew out of the 15-M, or Los Indignados, anti-austerity protests back in 2011. The organization took myriad local government seats after forming an official political party in 2014. And as of the national parliamentary elections held in December 2015, Podemos has emerged as a viable third-party counterforce to Spain’s historically two-party neoliberal government. During the recent elections, the ruling, conservative People’s Party (PP) lost sixty-four seats, while the opposing Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) hemorrhaged twenty seats. Podemos, by contrast, earned sixty-nine seats, coming in just 300,000 votes behind PSOE and securing roughly 20% of the votes within the Spanish parliament. And in fourth place was Ciudadanos, the smaller, center-right “Party of the Citizenry.” Ciudadanos won a sizeable forty seats in parliament, but this was far less than early polling predicted.

Commentators have dubbed Podemos’ and Ciudadanos’ upset of Spain’s two-party system a political earthquake, while the international left is characterizing the battle ahead as source of great hope and an opportunity to bring real change to Europe. Here, however, we dampen the leftist enthusiasm surrounding the Spanish election, and regarding Podemos in particular, putting pressure on what we argue to be the party’s under-theorized and rather conservative program for economic change. Specifically, we offer a critique of Podemos’ commitment to so-called “sound finance,” as well as the tax-and-spend liberalism upon which its proposed solution to Eurozone austerity is supposed to hinge. But we also suggest a more promising way forward: that Podemos join forces with the fifth-ranking Unidad Popular party. Unidad Popular’s primary economist has turned to the heterodox school of political economy known as Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), coming to see what Podemos takes to be economic truths regarding the Eurozone as neoliberal myths that should be overtly politicized and rejected as such. By collaborating with Unidad Popular, we conclude, Podemos stands to not only pose a serious threat to Eurozone austerity, but also supplant the neoliberal order with an alternative and more just political-economic regime.

Political Crossroads

The general elections results that some people are characterizing as the end of the Spain’s hegemonic ’78 Regime are not quite as promising as such pronouncements let on. Podemos still lacks the necessary votes to command real power in the government, and the neoliberal bipartisanism comprised of the false choice between PP conservatives and PSOE socialists will continue to rule Spanish politics for some time. What Podemos’ electoral gains do represent is a crucial political challenge. Now it is time for Podemos to decide whether to openly collaborate with others, thereby creating a relatively stable government that can reverse austerity, or to refuse cooperation, likely forcing a new election cycle.

Though constrained in its own right, this is essentially Podemos’ decision to make. The dominant PP has no chance to win a working parliamentary majority without the endorsement of the PSOE. With an electoral base that is, demographically speaking, doomed, PP received more than 7,215,000 votes in the election, but lost more than 3,500,0000 votes from 2011. PSOE, meanwhile, saw its worst outcome since 1977: 5,530,779 votes, losing more than 1,500,000 since 2011. This leaves Podemos to negotiate between three future scenarios. None are certain. And each comes with its own rewards and pitfalls.

In the first scenario, the PP could form a government through more or less open cooperation with the PSOE and Ciudadanos. This arrangement would look something like the political makeup of the current German government. However, open collaboration may prove dangerous for the PSOE. As some regional leaders of that party are explicitly warning (if not threatening), the PSOE’s Pedro Sanchez should not rush too quickly to show support for the PP, since such an action may incite a mass defection of voters from the PSOE towards Podemos. Podemos’ recent gains have gone far to unmoor the decades-old truism that the PSOE is the Spanish left’s only feasible tool for combating PP conservatives, and the PSOE are now visibly worried.

Under a second scenario, the PSOE can attempt to constitute a new government by aligning itself with the third party, Podemos, and the fifth party, Unidad Popular. But this is also unlikely, considering the fact that Podemos rose to power by rejecting Spain’s bipartisan regime and calling for a new constitutional process. Podemos won its power from voters who resist the PP and PSOE duopoly, seeing both parties as more or less equally guilty of alienating the citizenry and exploiting the revolving doors between government, industry, and finance. Podemos disparages this class as the casta (caste) and vows to overturn it. To renege on this promise could prove politically deadly. One way to for Podemos to skirt this problem would be to demand the PSOE accept certain far-left measures, such as the referendum about Catalonia’s (and other regions’) “right to decide.” Podemos’ allies in these regions are unwavering on this issue, and persuading the PSOE to sign on to such a measure would go far to secure Podemos’ political base. Unfortunately, however, the PSOE has historically refused this policy and in all likelihood will not adopt it.

Finally, in a third scenario no coalitions are built between the reigning parties and we see a repetition of the same general elections in few months. This scenario is most likely, given the obstacles suggested above. In this case, the bipartisan regime will continue its decline and Podemos will use the PSOE’s rejection of its own faux leftism to erode more of the PSOE’s electoral base. Such a process may result in Podemos overtaking the PSOE and eventually taking command of parliament. But there are clearly many moving parts at work here, rendering the future of the Spanish left at once promising and uncertain.

Podemos’ Economic Program

Such are the political crossroads that Podemos and the Spanish left in general will face in the months ahead. But there is still another and, we would claim, more important matter to consider, and one that fundamentally shifts the ground beneath this unfolding story. This is the issue of political economy and specifically, the economic program Podemos aims to install, if and when it manages to take hold of parliament.

Surprisingly, Podemos’ economic platform has received inadequate critical attention by the leftist commentariat. This is especially true of English-language media. Much has been written about Podemos in the US, UK, and elsewhere. But such writing tends to focus on Podemos’ leader, Pablo Iglesias, and devote most of its energy to weighing the relevance of Podemos’ status as a popular political movement in relation to similar efforts around the globe. As a consequence, English speakers are offered little concrete discussion about the specific economic policies Podemos is proposing. Iglesias himself has published articles in English-language publications such as New Left Review, Jacobin, and The Guardian. These pieces explore political struggles, communication strategies, and grassroots organizing. Yet Iglesias devotes very few words to outlining Podemos’ economic program in such texts, leaving most English-language readers in the dark.

In truth, Podemos’ economic program has evolved quite a bit since the party’s initial formation. But this economic program seems to become more and more conservative as time progresses. At first, for instance, Podemos proposed a Basic Income Guarantee and debt relief for citizens, in addition to making more general promises about ending austerity. Yet month by month, Podemos has dropped both the Basic Income Guarantee and the debt relief program, as well as myriad other proposals. To be sure, the party remains committed to its central promise, which is to repair and expand Spain’s welfare state. But Podemos has conspicuously pared down its economic platform in compliance with the reigning economic orthodoxy in an effort to secure political legitimacy both within Spain and abroad.

The Trouble with Podemos

Although Podemos’s grassroots-driven rise to power should be seen as meaningful and genuinely exciting, the party’s economic strategy is simply inadequate to win the political struggle it aims to conduct against the neoliberal order. The real problem with Podemos’ political economy lies less in the specific proposals the party is offering, but rather in the unreflected neoliberal assumptions that underlie the party’s shifting economic platform. First among these assumptions is Podemos’ apparently blind commitment to the doctrine of sound finance: the mythic principle that a healthy national economy requires government to balance its budget, whether in the short run or over the course of the business cycle. As Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has shown, this principle is not only inimical to economic productivity, but also debilitating for equality and justice. Meanwhile, this principle rests upon another noxious maxim Podemos holds dear: the false notion that states are revenue constrained and that a government must tax before it can spend toward the public good.

The only scenarios under which a sovereign government might be constrained in this way, contend MMT economists, is when international gold standards or currency-peg agreements force states to accept debt obligations in a currency over which they assert little control. Such arrangements not only limit public spending to the tax revenues the state is capable of collecting, but also force governments to bend to the dictates of international creditors. Put another way, metal standards and currency pegs transform sovereign nations into de facto colonies of other political bodies.

This is why MMT economists such as Bill Mitchell have long spoken out against the bankrupt neoliberal logics that undergird the Maastricht Treaty. Signed in February 1992 by the members of the European Community in Maastricht, Netherlands, this treaty robbed European member states of their fiscal sovereignty and established the Eurozone as a monetary union without the strong fiscal union that would be required to support it. This has resulted in an abstract and especially cruel version of an old-time gold standard, which paradoxically forgoes any basis in gold bullion. Against the warnings of a dissenting minority, the Eurozone’s quasi-gold standard has crippled European nations by restricting public spending to a finite pool of value and in turn forcing governments into brutal debt agreements.

The dominant narrative sees the resulting sovereign debt crises as the crux of the Eurozone disaster, thought to be the consequence of profligate governments being unable to live within their means. However, these crises are mere symptoms of the Eurozone’s faulty structure. The true cause of this disaster is the Eurozone’s shackling of government spending to a false finitude and treating this subjugation as a natural state of affairs. Though written in somewhat technical language, Mitchell’s account of the Eurozone’s structural failings is instructive:

It is a basic characteristic of any monetary system that government can only create risk free liabilities if they are denominated in its own currency. … [However], the current design of the Eurozone determines that the Member State governments are not sovereign in the sense that they are forced to use a foreign currency and must issue debt to private bond markets in that foreign currency to fund any fiscal deficits. … The member state governments thus can run out of money and become insolvent if the bond markets decline to purchase their debt. … Their fiscal positions must then take the full brunt of any economic downturn because there is no federal counter stabilization function. Among other things, this means the elected governments cannot guarantee the solvency of the banks that operate within their borders.ⁱ

Governments require the political capacity to create money, or “risk-free liabilities,” on demand, Mitchell explains. Such powers are needed to maintain the solvency of banks, as well as to use fiscal policy to counter recessions and depressions. The Eurozone, however, strips member states of this spending capacity and requires them to borrow on international bond markets. The result transforms sovereign governments into cash-strapped debtors, makes economic recovery for individual nation-states impossible, and dooms the entire Eurozone system to failure.

Fellow MMTers L. Randall Wray and Dimitri B. Papadimitriou describe the historical consequences of the Eurozone’s lethal design as follows:

From the very start, the European Monetary Union (EMU) was set up to fail. The host of problems we are now witnessing, from the solvency crises on the periphery to the bank runs in Spain, Greece, and Italy, were built into the very structure of the EMU and its banking system. Policymakers have admittedly responded to these various emergencies with an uninspiring mix of delaying tactics and self-destructive policy blunders, but the most fundamental mistake of all occurred well before the buildup to the current crisis. What we are witnessing are the results of a design flaw. When individual nations like Greece or Italy joined the EMU, they essentially adopted a foreign currency—the euro—but retained responsibility for their nation’s fiscal policy. This attempted separation of fiscal policy from a sovereign currency is the fatal defect that is tearing the Eurozone apart.ⁱⁱ

As Wray and Papadimitriou have it, the Eurozone crisis is not the direct outcome of pro-business policymaking and anti-social austerity programs, as vile as these measures are. It is, rather, an effect of the calamitous finitude baked into the EMU project. The Troika can say, “Pay up!” and “Tighten your belts!” until they are blue in the face. But European governments will be structurally incapable of settling such debts as long as their monetary sovereignty remains fettered. To make matters worse, Germany’s tendency to hold money surpluses as the Eurozone’s net exporter further exacerbates the debtor positions of other member states. If the money supply is finite in the Eurozone and the German economy hoards its export profits, this means that there is simply not enough money to go around and that import-dependent economies such as Greece, Spain, and Italy will continue to suffer deficits no matter how successfully they manage to tax their distressed populations.

Europe’s phantom gold standard has not only immiserated populations, but also quashed Syriza’s resistance to the ongoing devastation in Greece. This is not merely because the Troika rejected what Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis consistently referred to as Syriza’s “modest proposal.” It is because, unlike during previous eras when metal standards were both popularly contested and philosophically denounced, neoliberal ideology has come to wholly naturalize the Eurozone’s shrouded cross of gold. This has made real transformation unimaginable, as Varoufakis and his team sadly discovered in July 2015.

For this reason, Podemos will have to directly thematize and politicize the Eurozone’s taken-for-granted finitude if it wishes to make meaningful and lasting transformations. First and foremost, this means reclaiming the state’s monetary sovereignty and boundless fiscal capacities. But it shall also require a major propaganda campaign, aimed at persuading ordinary people that the state is limited only by real resources and productive infrastructures and simply cannot run out of an abstract unit of account. It must be made clear that only by seizing government’s power to spend as needed can Podemos hope to end austerity and create the conditions for full employment and widespread prosperity. However, for all its leftist rhetoric and broad grassroots support, Podemos remains ill-equipped to end austerity since it does not dare imagine liberating Spain’s public purse from the Troika’s asphyxiating grip.

Podemos’ economic program is thoroughly consistent with the gold standard metaphysics of sound finance. Party leaders imagine they can simultaneously adopt this ideology and succeed in accomplishing what Syriza could not: acting against austerity while playing along with Eurozone budgetary rules. Upon these faulty premises, Podemos then treats what is in reality a very conservative tax-and-spend liberalism as the crux of its economic strategy. A Podemos-led government would seek to reverse social spending cuts by increasing some taxes, creating a slate of new taxes, and reinforcing the mandate of the AEAT (the Spanish equivalent of the IRS) of fighting tax evasion. Believing that public programs should be funded by this revenue, Podemos thus plans to tether the recovery and expansion of the Spanish welfare state to the futile task of fighting tax avoidance within a zone that permits free trade and capital movement. In such a zone, every private person and corporation can shuffle money easily between countries without notice. Barring a common tax authority and total multinational cooperation, even the most vigilant efforts to collect taxes are bound to fail.

Podemos’ chief economist, Nacho Alvárez Peralta, is quite explicit about the party’s devotion to sound finance and tax-and-spend economics. Alvarez expressly supports government budget-balancing. He breaks with the European Central Bank only on the timeline he asserts is required to achieve the criteria outlined by the Eurozone’s Stability and Growth Pact (SGP). Alvarez is also the architect behind Podemos’ tax-based strategy to fix the welfare state, which he presumes to be the only way out of the current mess.

Podemos thinks it can somehow accomplish what Syriza did not. However, it must learn the true lesson of the Greek fiasco: As long as a nation-state remains inside the Eurozone and subject to its SGP budget requirements, there shall be no alternative to austerity or the neoliberal order. And with the EU Commission’s latest demand that the next Spanish government cut another 9 billion euros to meet stringent deficit targets, the stakes of learning this lesson could not be higher.

Another Future

With MMT’s critique of political economy in focus, a more promising way forward presents itself for the Spanish left, one that refuses the neoliberal premises that have come to frame Eurozone politics. As we suggested at the outset, this will require Podemos to join forces with Unidad Popular, an avowedly socialist and feminist party of the left now headed by economist and MMT advocate Alberto Garzón. As opposed to Podemos’ Iglesias and Alvarez, both Garzón and Unidad Popular’s chief economist, Eduardo Garzón (Alberto’s brother), hold a view of political economy that is very close to MMT’s understanding of monetary sovereignty, fiscal spending, and taxation. Garzón is well aware that Eurozone rules have perniciously, and needlessly, choked off the Spanish government’s spending powers, severely contracting what MMTers such as Stephanie Kelton refer to as the “fiscal space” that is necessary to sustain and enlarge a national economy.

In addition to restoring and developing the Spanish welfare state, Unidad Popular’s key economic proposal takes its cue from MMT’s idea for a federal Job Guarantee program. Garzón’s proposal is a modestly scaled version of MMT’s Job Guarantee. It is designed to provide community-focused, living-wage employment to Spain’s chronically under- and unemployed, which would not only provide immediate relief to destitute Spaniards, but also reverse the nation’s deflationary economy. Going beyond Keynesian pump priming, this Job Guarantee is meant to be a permanent public institution that expands countercyclically in lockstep with market downturns. If permitted to become a truly universal program, Spain’s Job Guarantee would serve a powerful new mediator of social production and value. In addition to setting just minimum standards for wages, working hours, and benefits, the Job Guarantee would carve out a larger space for public works that are free from market imperatives, place the program’s means of production in workers’ hands, socialize and compensate much unremunerated care work, and give everyday people a say in the shaping of their world.

What is more, Unidad Popular’s Job Guarantee scheme makes no mention of needing to meet the arbitrary budget goals of the SGP in order to fund such a program. This is because Unidad Popular roundly rejects the neoliberal premises of such goals. Indeed, if challenged by the Troika, the party is wholly prepared to set the crucial question before the body politic: Should we continue to obey the Troika’s crippling mandate in order to remain within the Eurozone? Or, shall we refuse the Troika’s dictates and risk ejection from the Eurozone? This is the question Syriza could not, or would not, ask. Yet what the Syriza tragedy has proven is that this is the key question upon which the fate of Europe shall depend.

Before the recent Spanish election, Podemos and Unidad Popular were in conversations to form a coalition. At the last minute, however, Podemos’ leaders broke off these talks for what we considered to be tactical reasons. Our hope is that there will be another chance to forge a coalition when the new elections are convoked. Of course, nothing will ensure the success of the Spanish left. All we have is our solidarity and commitment to struggle. But to fight against the neoliberal order while uncritically adopting neoliberal assumptions is to forfeit the contest from the start. Unless Podemos or any other leftist party is prepared to proffer a substantive alternative to the rules of the neoliberal game, we will no doubt suffer a disaster that is far greater than the one we are currently witnessing in Greece.

Such is the promise of MMT for the contemporary left: While MMT’s understanding of money as a limitless public instrument can free us from debt and austerity, its community-focused Job Guarantee provides means to build a new political economy, which transfigures social and ecological relations from the bottom up. Yet this is what other critical-theoretical appeals to MMT do not seem to comprehend. Reticent to appropriate and reshape the state apparatus, critics such as Nigel Dodd and David Graeber have called upon MMT’s understanding of money as a public balance sheet to challenge the inevitability of neoliberal power. In our estimation, however, MMT is more than a weapon for negating neoliberal domination. It is also a powerful tool for cultivating a positive and enduring alternative to the neoliberal catastrophe—first in Spain, then beyond.

 

Jorge Amar is a Spanish economist, president of the APEEP (Asociación por el Pleno Empleo y la Estabilidad de Precios, or Full Employment and Price Stability Association), and a doctoral candidate in Applied Economics at the Universidad Valencia. Recently, Amar served as economic advisor for Spain’s Unidad Popular party within the Grupo de elaboración política (Policy Elaboration Group), a provisional task force coordinated by economist Eduardo Garzón.

Scott Ferguson holds a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Film Studies from the University of California, Berkeley and is currently an assistant professor of Humanities & Cultural Studies at the University of South Florida. He is also a Research Scholar at the Binzagr Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. His essays have appeared in CounterPunch, Screen, Arcade, the Critical Inquiry blog, Naked Capitalism, Qui Parle, and Liminalities.

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