How do we imagine the climate changing?
Some scenarios involve techno-fixes like cloud-seeding or new kinds of carbon sinks. Cool tech, usually backed by even cooler entrepreneurs, saves the day -- Iron Man plus Al Gore plus Steve Jobs. In green.
Other scenarios are apocalyptic: blizzards, floods, tsunamis, and droughts; crashing planes; millions of migrants moving from south to north only to be shot at armed borders. The poor fight and starve; the rich enclave themselves in shining domed cities as they document the extinction of charismatic species and convince themselves they aren't next.
And there is climate change as unconscious: the stuff of stress, inconvenience, anxiety, and repression; the relief at not having to manage anymore; the enjoyment of change, destruction, and punishment. There will be a last judgment after all. Here those of us who follow the reports of emissions, temperature increases, and political failure get to enjoy being in the know, being those with access to the truth. We can't do anything about it, but we can judge everyone else for their blind, consumerist pleasures. We can name our new era, marking our impact as the Anthropocene (hey, we have changed the world after all.) Anticipatory Cassandras, we can watch from within our melancholic "pre-loss," to use Naomi Klein's term, comforted at least by the fantasy of our future capacity to say we knew it all along. We told you so.
The hardest thing is doing something about it. Coming together. Fighting against the multiple centrifugal forces that have produced us as individuals preoccupied with our particular freedoms, preferences, conveniences, and choices. It's no wonder in this setting that market approaches to climate change have appeared as popular options. They affirm the selves we've become and promise to solve the problems all in one new light-bulb or electronic car.
Some of our present difficulty comes from the challenge of imagining a better future. Does it involve a kind of re-peasantization? The elimination of all industry, of all the advantages accrued to some of us under late capitalism? Or is it closer to what we have now, but with windmills and bicycles, the Dutchification of everything? Or is it really not that big a deal at all, a few tweaks here and there so that society looks pretty much like it did in the 70s (Taxi Driver? New York told to drop dead?).
Naomi Klein's bold attempt in This Changes Everything is to take up the challenge of creating an alternative to the grim inequalities of our present trajectory by using climate change as a frame for galvanizing left politics. What the economic crises of the seventies and eighties were for the right (opportunities to deepen and extend neoliberalism), climate change can be for the left (an opportunity to "pull huge swaths of humanity out of poverty"). If the left fails to take this opportunity, that is, if we don't take advantage of the "existential urgency" that climate change provides to develop a more focused left strategy, we are doomed to "climate-change-fueled disaster capitalism--profiteering disguised as emission reduction, privatized hyper-militarized borders" etc (154). What we need, she tells us, is a People's Shock.
Rejecting narrow market-based approaches like cap and trade, Klein argues that climate change
could be the best argument progressives have ever had to demand the rebuilding and reviving of local economies; to reclaim our democracies from corrosive corporate influence; to block harmful new free trade deal and rewrite old ones; to invest in starving public infrastructure like mass transit and affordable housing; to take back ownership of essential services like energy and water; to remake our sick agricultural system into something much healthier; to open borders to migrants whose displacement is linked to climate impacts; to finally respect Indigenous land rights -- all of which would help to end grotesque levels of inequality within our nations and between them. (7)
Just as Marx and Engels linked communism to the workers movement, making communism the mission of the working class, so does Klein link a vision of a progressive future to the climate movement. If the only way to eliminate the exploitation of the workers is the abolition of capitalism, the only to eliminate the exploitation of the planet is .... multiple, dispersed activities combined within a diffuse policy framework oriented toward long-term planning and inspired by an essentialist, overly romantic vision of locality, indigeneity, and democracy (that is to say, populism).
Klein's attempt to make climate change the basis for a stronger left politics is a crucial political move. But she weakens it. She fails to see it through. At the site of this failure is a red hole, a missing communism that distorts her vision. She invokes radical politics, but ultimately pulls back into the formula of the alter-globalization movement: in a movement of movements, multiple communities can solve their problems democratically.
Klein presents the "core problem" preventing adequate response to climate change as "the stranglehold of market logic" and "unfettered corporate power." She says that "our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life." (21) We are in the midst of a battle between capitalism and the planet. If capitalism wins, and at this point it is winning, extremely dangerous warming will lock-in, threatening the habitability of the planet. What is to be done? We have to change everything.
Everything rides on how we understand "everything." Klein seems to understand it in terms of neoliberalism, where neoliberalism involves privatization, deregulation of the corporate sphere, lowering of taxes within a broader setting of global trade. By rendering the problem in terms of neoliberalism, she doesn't have to advocate the abolition of capitalism, even when her arguments tend in that direction. So her solution is a kind of global Green Keynesianism, a step back into the time before neoliberalism dismantled the welfare state. It is hard to say exactly what Klein has in mind, though, since she offers so many options in a giant menu of change. It's like she thinks "everything" should be on the table and we (each "community") should be able to pick what we want (perhaps in a truer, more democratic market).
Klein's sense of "everything" is limited by the absence of a communist alternative. For example, even as she criticizes market fundamentalism, she sometimes seems fully ensconced in it. She wants to "buy time for clean energy sources to increase their market share and to be seen as more viable alternatives, weakening the power of the fossil fuel lobby" (349). But if we have to change everything, why not just nationalize the fossil fuel industries and undertake a 5-10 year process of dismantling them? Or why not nationally fund clean energy and inject so many taxes and regulations into the carbon economy that it withers away? It's like Klein feels so fully trapped within the economic system we have that she can't break free even as she insists we must break free. There has been and still is a name for this break -- communism.
Some of the components of Klein's new Green Keynesianism would likely include: a carefully planned economy; basic annual income; big public sector expenditures; higher taxes on the rich; and tougher business regulations. The Green justification for the higher taxes on the rich is that they are the ones who need to curb their consumption. The big expenditures would include better public transit, energy efficient housing, and changes in land use to encourage local agriculture. Klein also favors doing a lot with taxes, following the "polluter pays" principle applied to corporations and the rich. It was never clear to me who or what was engaged in the long-term planning she advocates and what sort of force these plans would have. I expect that planning would occur on multiple levels. Given Klein's insistence on local, decentralized communities, it also isn't clear to me how the plans would be integrated.
Klein opposes the nationalization of energy. She advocates instead the model of democratically run, community-based utilities -- let a thousand renewable energy providers bloom! She treats this as a project of the commons (her models are Germany and Denmark). Governments provide a national framework within which decentralized, small-scale, local providers supply renewable energy.
Accompanying the core problem of market fundamentalism is a cultural narrative regarding human domination of the earth. This narrative, Klein argues, underlies much of the left as well as the capitalist right. The former Soviet Union, Mao's China, and contemporary extractivist left-wing governments in Latin America are clear examples, but so are trade unions fighting for "dirty" jobs instead of clean ones, and so are any left Keynesians who continue to think in developmentalist terms. In place of this narrative of domination, Klein's Green Keynesianism would emphasize regeneration, "relationships of reciprocity and interconnection with the natural world" (182).
How, then, can we make the change we want to see? Not with big Green: "the 'market-based' climate solutions favored by so many foundations and adopted by many greens have provided an invaluable service to the fossil fuel sector as a whole" (199). These include consumer-based solutions (buy Green!) as well as carbon trading schemes, and fracking as a clean energy bridge to renewables. In addition to having done little to nothing to lower emissions over the last twenty years, these approaches, she argues, make the problem worse by failing to challenge the hegemony of the market.
Klein has more confidence in the "movement of many movements" that she calls "Blockadia." These include anti-fracking, anti-extractive industry, and pipeline protests all over the world. Klein rightly emphasizes how the contemporary resistance movement is more than a NIMBY struggle. Across multiple sites, activists share the conviction that fossil fuels must remain in the ground. They use local issues (health, safety, livelihood) as instruments for getting at the global problem of climate change.
The struggles of Blockadia are the flip side of the extreme energy boom going on for the last decade (the one with Sarah Palin's tagline, "drill, baby, drill!"). In the US and Canada, this boom has made more visible the war that the fossil fuel industry has long tried to hide, namely, that the carbon economy--and the capitalist economy more generally--relies on sacrifice zones. Klein writes:
for a very long time, sacrifice zones all shared a few elements in common. They were poor places. Out-of-the-way places. Places where residents lacks political power, usually having to do with some combination of race, language, and class (310).
With the "extreme energy frenzy," the sacrifice zone has expanded. More people--and more people in the north and west, in areas formerly privileged enough to think they were entitled to turn their heads--are now in the zone of allowable sacrifice. From the vast reach of the Bakken, Marcellus, and Utica shale plays, to the Alberta tar sands, to the continent crossing pipelines, to deep-water oil rigs, to the exploding bomb trains, the intensification of the carbon economy has extended the range of expendable people and places.
Although Klein doesn't use these terms, climate change makes clear the scale of expropriation underpinning the carbon economy. The surplus value captured by the top-- by the owners, shareholders, and executives of the fossil fuel industry -- is expropriated not just from the workers in the industry (which it is), and not just from those living nearby (which it is), but from those living hundreds and thousands of miles away (which is a characteristic also of nuclear power). "Sacrifice zone" has the capacity to be a key concept for knitting together anti-capitalist and climate struggles.
It's correlative concept could then be the "commons." For example, we would want to eliminate sacrifice zones and treat the entire planet as a commons. Having disallowed communism, Klein can't get us to this point. More specifically, in the place in her argument where Klein could -- and should -- point to an internationalist egalitarian vision such as that championed by communists she appeals to a vague notion of democracy understood as multiplicity combined with a romantic vision of indigenous people. This combination embeds unresolved tensions in her argument.
The first problem is the equation of the Blockadia movements with a struggle for democracy. Klein writes: this emergent network of resistance is "driven by a desire for a deeper form of democracy, one that provides communities with real control over those resources that are most critical to collective survival--the health of the water, air, and soil" (295) and "the fight against violent resource extraction and the fight for greater community control, democracy, and sovereignty are two sides of the same coin" (309). Klein displaces particular struggles (pipeline, fracking, climate) into the political field rather than seeing how the struggles themselves change the field by contesting its terms. Most of the time, activist groups aren't majorities. They are small groups trying to force a position and bring more people over to their side -- as well they should!
Additionally, Klein implies that communities are somehow unified and that they encounter an external force (state or corporation) that is violently extracting resources from them. But division goes all the way through communities. The communities themselves are divided. The deadlocked political system that we have is both a cause and an effect of this division. Marxists refer to this division as class conflict (which works well enough if we have a loose understanding of 'class'). By omitting the constitutive place of division, Klein can suggest that community sovereignty is a goal, again, as if the community were united against fossil fuels -- but the fact that we are not united is precisely the problem the book, and the movement, encounters.
To use a local example, in the battle against the expansion of methane gas storage and LPG storage in the fragile salt caverns adjacent to Seneca Lake, the Town of Reading -- where the facility is located -- endorses the gas storage plan. Schuyler County -- where the facility is located -- also supports the plan, although the vote came down to 1 person in their local board and the community is clearly divided. All the other counties surrounding the lake oppose the plan, but most of this opposition came from votes by city or county boards after petitions from activists. The state is considering the issues, and will make a decision. The federal government has already agreed to let the methane storage proceed, but might reconsider. Which level counts as the community? Why? And what sense does this make in a global setting? No one involved has said that the process has not been democratic. This is what democracy looks like. We just don't think it has yielded the right outcome.
The second problem is Klein's association of communities with indigeneity and land. Klein writes, "communities with strong ties to the land have always, and will always, defend themselves against businesses that threaten their ways of life" (309). Here again she denies division, as if everyone in a community agreed on what constituted a threat, as if they were all similarly situated against a threat, as if they were never too deluded, tired, or exploited to defend themselves, as if they could never themselves constitute a threat to themselves. Cities, towns, states, and regions make bad decisions all the time; they stimulate industries that destroy them. Klein, though, has something else in mind, "a ferocious love" that "no amount of money can extinguish." She associates this love "with an identity, a culture, a beloved place that people are determined to pass on to their grandchildren, and that their ancestors may have paid for with great sacrifice." She continues, "And though this kind of connection to place is surely strongest in Indigenous communities where the ties to the land go back thousands of years, it is in fact Blockadia's defining feature" (342).
Participants in my seminar found this description racist or fascist. Even though this is not Klein's intent, her rhetoric deploys a set of myths regarding nature, and some people's relation to nature, that make some people closer to nature (and further from civilization) than others. It also justifies an intense defense of blood and soil on the part of one group's attachment to a place such that others become foreign, invaders, rightly excluded as threats to our way of life, our cultural identity. Given that climate change is already leading to increased migration and immigration and that the US and Europe are already responding by militarizing borders, a language of cultural defense and ties to the land is exactly what we don't need in a global movement for climate justice.
Klein's argument, though, gets worse as it juxtaposes indigenous people's love of place with the "extreme rootlessness" of the fossil fuel workforce. These "highly mobile" pipefitters, miners, engineers, and big rig drivers produce a culture of transience, even when they "may stay for decades and raise their kids" in a place. The language of rootless echoes with descriptions of cosmopolitan Jews, intellectuals, and communists. Some are always foreign elements threatening our way of life.
In contrast, I imagine climate politics as breaking the link between place and identity. To address climate change, we have to treat the world itself as a commons and build institutions adequate to the task of managing it. I don't have a clear idea as to what these institutions would look like. But the idea that no one is entitled to any place seems better to me as an ethos for a red-green coalition. It requires us to be accountable to every place.
I should wrap this up. The final tension I want to address comes in Klein's conclusion, as she emphasizes mass social movements. Invoking the abolition movement, Klein is inspiring, properly crediting Chris Hayes for his influential Nation article linking climate change and the emancipation of the slaves in the US. Nonetheless, her argument is strange. She calls for societal transformation but refuses the term "revolution." Throughout the book, she has said that we are running out of time to stop a warming trend so severe as to destroy civilization as we know it if not eliminate the human species altogether. She invokes Brad Werner's famous paper announcing that earth is basically fucked. But she writes:
And let's take it for granted that we want to do these radical things democratically and without a bloodbath, so violent, vanguardist revolutions don't have much to offer in the way of roadmaps (450).
This lets her completely discount the revolutionary movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, as if there is nothing to learn from any of the large scale organizing undertaken by communists, socialists, wobblies, and unionists. Her model for the left thus relies on extracting from the left a central component of our history. Frankly, at the level of tactics alone, this is a bad call: why sign on to a political project premised on the rejection of working class achievements (a move which repeats a ubiquitous gesture of erasure since 1989). Wouldn't incorporating these achievements be fundamental to any effort to reinvent "the very idea of the collective, the communal, the commons, the civil, and the civic after so many decades of attack and neglect" (460)? Klein is trying to open up a collective desire for collectivity, but without communism.
It is also without revolution, which Klein dismisses as vanguardist, as if her Blockadians weren't themselves at the vanguard of climate struggle. But what does it mean to reject revolution? If the movements are mobilized as she suggests, what will stop them? What would block or hinder the people after they are moving? Perhaps the state, since Klein hasn't said anything about seizing it. Perhaps each other, since she thinks of us as divided into local communities. Perhaps the capitalist system, since she hasn't called for its abolition. Or perhaps this isn't the worry, since we are unlikely to be mobilized enough in time at all -- and for enough of us in the north, that will be okay, at least for a while.
Hi Jodi,
I really like your article except my only concern is the sense-of-place stuff. Your arguments are really pushing me to think deeply about this, because you have articulated very well the problems that come with 'connection to place,' an idea which I have always taken for granted to be true--that people can become connected to place and have a sense of home and that when they lose it they can feel a sense of loss. I would like to see Klein herself debate you on this because I get what you are saying in theory and see all the problems with bloodlines etc that you are describing, but I wonder how convincing the argument against place really is.
Displacement is a huge and painful and traumatic issue. Being forced off one's land through violence or coercion can be devastating--see partitions far and wide across the world. But land claims are a huge issue in Canada and many First Nations groups in Canada were devastated because of issues of displacement. I'm just wondering if you think it racist or fascist to acknowledge this? I think you're right to point out that viewing indigenous peoples as 'closer to the land' is problematic and quite possibly racist; however, the word "indigenous" itself which you are using invokes that very connection to a particular land or region, and that seems like a different issue, because many colonized groups across the world self-identify in this way.
There is also the age-old problem within Marxism/Communism that it 'originated' as a European theory and practice, right? Should we replace the word 'indigenous' or, say, Cree with the word 'worker' then? I don't know. There may be some troubling erasures there that people smarter than myself might be able to address, but I just wanted to point out that you might be glossing over the reasons for some of Klein's tentativeness on these issues, especially as she is Canadian and these issues are alive in Canadian politics in a way that they are not in the US.
Just my thoughts. Thanks for the thoughtful article.
Posted by: Robin Durnford | March 17, 2015 at 08:48 PM
Robin,
Thanks for your comments. I really appreciate them. I think you are right to point out the problem of displacement. That's a real concern, one that my post here doesn't allow room for. If I ever expand this, I would want to do it in a way that takes into account people that climate change (and other catastrophic disruptions) forces to migrate. What is the best way to account for their loss without at the same time buttressing those who would want to bar them from entering their 'land' using the same argument? I am deeply concerned about culturalist arguments that want to exclude immigrants as threats to their ways of life.
I agree with you that it is important to respect the claims and experiences of First Nations groups, to acknowledge their histories. I don't completely understand what you are getting at with my use of "indigenous" (although in the back of my head as I was writing was a term that I couldn't remember but that I understand as being a Dutch term for people who are originally Dutch people; it is used by the right in Holland to discriminate against the presence of formerly colonized people now residing in the Netherlands).
On Marxism/Communism: what does a story of origins do in your argument? I don't think that the originary place of a concept determines its meaning. Communism of course has an ancient history in agrarian communities. Marxism took modern forms in anti-colonial and people's liberation struggles. It has been alive and well, a motive force in third world struggles.
I appreciate your attentiveness to the way Klein's argument resonates in Canada. This is important. It also could be a limit to the possibility of her argument becoming a force in global movement.
Thanks again for your comment.
Posted by: Jodi Dean | March 17, 2015 at 09:18 PM
Great review, Jodi, including lots of stuff that no one has brought up at all in the others I've seen, especially the idea that the ecological crisis demands that we break the link between place and identity. I'll have to think this through and discuss it with others. It really flies in the face of the localist movement in the US and, as Robin says, with indigenous struggles in Canada and elsewhere. (See Greg Sharzer's No Local if you haven't!)
On Klein's failure to consider revolution and meaningful precedents for what is to be done, see also Jan Cox's and my review in Against the Current: http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/4339
Are you planning to publish this elsewhere? Is it all right with you if I post it on the System Change not Climate Change website? http://systemchangenotclimatechange.org/
Michael Gasser
System Change not Climate Change
Posted by: Mapinduzi21k | March 18, 2015 at 02:04 AM
Michael,
Thanks for your comment -- and for the links. I will definitely check them out. I would be delighted if you posted my review on the System Change Not Climate Change website.
best,
Jodi
Posted by: Jodi Dean | March 18, 2015 at 09:05 AM
Hi Jodi,
I love this review. Thank you for the insights. I made some similar points (and some different ones) in my review for Antipode (see https://radicalantipode.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/book-review_huber-on-klein.pdf).
Also, hi - I'm a Geography Professor at Syracuse (your neighbor). I'm a big fan of your work (and assigned The Communist Horizon in a recent seminar). Would love if we cross paths at some point (let me know if you're ever in Syracuse and I'll do the same).
Matt
Posted by: Matt Huber | March 18, 2015 at 03:04 PM
I enjoyed reading your review. A class of mine on organizing was assigned the introduction of Klein's book and the debate stuck around the probability of abolishing capitalism. Your review laid out the stakes and the assumptions clearly. I especially liked your comments on immigration and indigeneity, and mobility.
My name's Rudy and I'm a past student of yours. Occupy Their Desire 2014. I hope you're doing well.
Posted by: Rudy Gerson | March 19, 2015 at 11:11 PM
Thanks for the stimulating and challenging review. I haven't read Klein's book yet, but the problem that I see with it as presented here is actually the very same problem that I see with your review—namely, that it doesn't sufficiently challenge the picture of human reason and human progress as a kind of mastery—mastery over others, over nature, and over the self—which is also a very seductive picture of human freedom or agency.
Communism: fine. Challenging the terms of the "political": fine. Vanguardism: maybe fine.
If we are to take the dual challenges of climate change and deepening inequality and exploitation seriously, however, and not just shrug it off as you suggest we might do at the end of your piece, we have to accept that it involves at least two things:
1. taking the problem of deep cultural diversity and pluralism seriously, which includes both de-centring our own provincial views of the world AND protecting and renewing traditions that sustain us as collectives—including as resistant political collectivities; and
2. learning to control our DEMANDS on the natural world and the localities we inhabit, and adapt *to them* (rather than adapting them to us), instead of trying to 'control' the natural resources themselves—democratically or otherwise.
On the first point: the problem with the critique of romanticized indigneity as "racist" or "fascist" is not just that it fails to take Klein's motivations into consideration, although it definitely does that. The problem is that it completely fails to provide a view of culture that allows for preservation—ANY preservation—let alone creative renewal—of the semantic and moral resources for understanding and changing our situation. It's also a very lazy argument that self-evidently comes from a view *outside* of cultures that have been subject to genocidal practices and policies for hundreds of years. From where in your vision of (what I gather is) a rootless, green, cosmopolitan communism would these cultures preserve their traditions, their languages and their practices? From what standpoint?
Beyond that, I think this view of communist revolution is at least as vague and question-begging as Naomi Klein's is made out to be. Not that I'm against communism, or even all forms of revolution. But part of the reason capitalism is such a seductive ideology is that it also feeds on discourses of the new, discourses of revolution, which are by now so worn out and hackneyed that to raise them at all is inviting on oneself unsustainable burdens of linguistic acrobatics to make them sound convincing. And, as the conclusion of your article indicates, you yourself don't seem to think that they are very convincing.
So what *are* we to do, as human beings, human beings who live in a finite world, in troubled and troubling relationships with others (human and non-human alike)? How are we to respond to conditions of deepening crisis, suffering, intolerance and inequality in our societies? How do we go on in such dark and dangerous times, when the future is somewhere we don't want to go, yet also something we can't seem to resist, somewhere we go compulsively, as though powerless to our fates? How can we articulate things such that our words and deeds re-open the future, where the future actually offers something genuinely new, where it begins to answer our real needs and problems, while remaining answerable to the very legitimate questions that have caused us to doubt our current path?
Needless to say, there isn't enough space here to give a complete answer. But I would suggest two things: first, that we need to displace the view of human agency as a will to power—be it "people power" or otherwise—with a view of agency as receptivity, as willingness to critically and self-critically cooperate and learn together (including from non-human others); and second, we need to replace the project of vanguardist revolution with something more like reciprocal elucidation, or what philosopher Nikolas Kompridis calls "reflective disclosure," a project where we disclose alternative possibilities for living better, more reflective ways of life, ways of life that don't generate as many new problems for us and for the planet, that are less self-undermining, and that generate fewer skeptical problems about the future like those produced by talk of communist revolution (and globalization, and progress in general). Naomi Klein's ideas may have something to contribute to that, and the ideas in this article may, too. But one thing that seems sure to me, is that any notion of an *intellectual* vanguard, where one person provides *the* template for criticism or change, is not what it will look like.
We have to listen to and learn from each other. Nobody—and definitely no critic—is in an epistemically superior position in this regard. The critic is at eye level with her addressees when it comes to the change she articulates, and the change she wants to see in the world, and has no privileged position when it comes to evaluating whether, in fact, that change actually answers our needs and our sense of ourselves as agents after the fact.
It's not that we don't need new collectivities, or that we can't call those collectivities by names that mean something to us (including communism)—rather, it's that we can't force other people to change, or to adopt our terms for change. That kind of politics just isn't on anymore. The way is barred. That's what it means to do things democratically, however it is that we conceive of the political. It will certainly take imagination and courage to find new forms of resistance and new forms that don't reproduce all the old assumptions about change being something that we *can* force on others, but if we decide that we want to take these problems seriously—and don't, in fact, just want to shrug them off—that's what we have to grapple with.
I don't think it's going to be easy. But as Kompridis writes*, is there anything more important today "than to once again take on the task of disclosing alternative possibilities, possibilities through which we might recapture the promise of the future— through which we might recapture the future as a promise?"
Personally, I don't think so.
*in Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future (MIT Press, 2006)
Posted by: Chris Wiseman | March 20, 2015 at 03:14 AM
I said that we need to "disclose alternative possibilities… that generate fewer skeptical problems"
I meant fewer skeptical worries, or anxieties.
Posted by: Chris Wiseman | March 20, 2015 at 03:21 AM
Jodi,
I'm glad to see you formalize an answer to the question of the difference between fascism and populism (as posed to you at the 2011 conference on the Communist idea). On the topic of indigenous peoples, I agree with your disagreements with Klein. Not only are her comments racist (intent aside) but they also are the very logic used in "the erection of new walls" as Zizek calls it. My question for you is, given your recent engagement with Bruno Bosteels, what are your thoughts on "The Indigenous Question".
As you no doubt are aware, Bosteels is critical of Zizek and others who fail to address this question (although, Bosteels' dismissal of Zizek's condemnation of Morales was perhaps a bit unfair). Have you read any of Álvaro García Linera's writing? I know that Bosteels draws heavily on him in the final chapter of "The Actuality of Communism" (and "Plebian Power" was just published in English). Or do you have a different approach?
Thank You,
Ryan
P.S. It seems that much of your critique of Klein can be summarized in Mao's statement that "There are contradictions among the people". The former seems to offer an almost naive binary opposition between communities and businesses/corporations.
Posted by: Ryan Costello | March 24, 2015 at 03:45 PM