My own belief is that we need to produce both concrete projects and a vastly multiplied vision, if we want to make our lives count beyond ourselves and if we want to return some kind of future to the pasts of the Left with which we may identify. A radically democratic ecological critique of progress can yield a new understanding of modernization, one that includes cultural difference and self-determination along with a practical understanding of the cycles of the earth, far beyond the old narratives of an industrial proletariat in a national frame.
I think that all the great productive blocs now have their edges, their exploited or abandoned peripheries whose populations are leaving to become the laboring mainstays of the very center that helps destroy their homelands. Liberal fascism — a name for the present social order when it gets ugly — tries to divide into a hierarchy the people who could oppose its projects of destruction. It sets up a gradated system of inclusion and exclusion to divide classes of people from each and to set them against each other, with police, borders, barbed wire and militaries marking off ever more extreme gradations. Crucially, it tries to divide the precarious classes who have had some access to official education from the excluded classes who have had none, who have had to learn everything as they could, the hard way.
What the Left needs, in order to offer anything at all to huge numbers of people who no longer see it or hear it, is to envision something like ecodevelopment on a continental or regional scale, a political process for improving life and movement across the territory, through methods that are both collaborative and ecological, and therefore span the divides between classes and also transform the very linearity of the rationalized production systems. What the Left needs, what the world needs, is to be able to give both the precarious classes and the migrants an active role in building a better world, in a system where the most educated and capable can also participate on the basis of something other than a pure quest for personal profit. We need to envision a chance for the potentials of technological change to be redistributed by their root producers, beyond national borders and racism, in an economy of embodied and responsible flows that organizes itself in a productive relation to critique and to radically democratic debate. A modernization that carves out the places for localized decision-making, for the affirmation of communities of value, but also for artistic experiments with the process of becoming. It’s clear that nothing like this exists in reality and that many promises have come to nothing, so there is no use to be naive, for sure. But is it clear, in a unifying world society, that movements of political resistance can do without this kind of constructive proposal?
[Picture of Nam June Paik with his Zen for Film (1964).]