<\/p>\n
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u201cWe\u2019re so\u00a0self-important, so self-important. Everybody\u2019s gonna save something now: \u201cSave the trees! Save the bees! Save the whales! Save those snails!\u201d and the greatest arrogance of all: \u201cSave the planet!\u201d What?! Are these fucking people kidding me?! Save the planet?! We don\u2019t even know how to take care of ourselves yet! We haven\u2019t learned how to care for one another! and we\u2019re gonna save the fucking planet?! (\u2026) <\/em><\/p>\n
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/em>Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet\u2026 nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine\u2026 the people are fucked! (\u2026) Compared to the people, THE PLANET IS DOING GREAT: Been here four and a half billion years! Do you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years, we\u2019ve been here what? 100,000? Maybe 200,000? And we\u2019ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over 200 years. 200 years versus four and a half billion and we have the conceit to think that somehow, we\u2019re a threat? That somehow, we\u2019re going to put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that\u2019s just a-floatin\u2019 around the sun? The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us: been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drifts, solar flares, sunspots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles, hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages, and we think some plastic bags and aluminum cans are going to make a difference?<\/em><\/p>\n
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0The planet isn\u2019t going anywhere\u2026 we are! We\u2019re going away! Pack your shit folks! We\u2019re going away, and we won\u2019t leave much of a trace either, thank God for that\u2026 maybe a little styrofoam\u2026 maybe\u2026 little styrofoam. (\u2026) <\/em><\/p>\n
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we\u2019re gone (\u2026) and if it\u2019s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: The Earth plus Plastic. The Earth doesn\u2019t share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the Earth! The Earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the Earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place: it wanted plastic for itself, didn\u2019t know how to make it, needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old philosophical question: \u201cWhy are we here?\u201d PLASTIC!!! ASSHOLES!!!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u2014 George Carlin, Jammin in New<\/em> York<\/em> (1992)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u201cThe exit from capitalism has already begun: it will either be made of catastrophes or of civilizational progress.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u2014 Andr\u00e9 Gorz (2007)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\u201cWe, Civilizations, know now that we are mortal,<\/em>\u201d Paul Valery wrote in the wake of the first world war[1]<\/a> \u2026 Yet it once again seems fair to ask: do we really, though? Are we really only struggling with the gap between knowing something and actually doing anything about it? There seems to be an awful lot more talks about ridiculous plans for the terraforming of Mars than about the fact we are at present collectively engaged in the process of Venus-forming the Earth.[2]<\/a> As the world climate conference gathers in Egypt, a country whose leaders seem bent on competing with those of Saudi Arabia to see who will be first to turn Shelley\u2019s Ozymandias vision into reality, we may have reasons enough to doubt the assertion of the author of cemetery by the sea.[3]<\/a><\/p>\n
Val\u00e9ry wrote that poem in S\u00e8te, on France\u2019s Mediterranean shores \u2014 where the Utopia movement, who welcomes us today in their volunteer-run library and community organizing center, held last month its yearly three days long \u201csummer university,\u201d jointly with the Convivialist Movement.[4]<\/a> The latter is a network of intellectuals founded by the great contemporary French sociologist Alain Caill\u00e9, a few decades after he had already founded the Graeber-acclaimed MAUSS movement.[5]<\/a> It is named after Ivan Illich\u2019s brilliant little essay, Conviviality<\/em>, in which the author of \u201cdeschooling society\u201d and medical nemesis introduced the notion of a \u201ccounter-productivity threshold\u201d: that point when the adoption of a tool becomes so widespread it ends up making that very tool a hinderance to the things it was originally meant to facilitate. He thus famously takes the example of San Francisco, where virtually nothing can be reached without making use of a car, and demonstrates that between the time spent taking care of their cars and earning money to pay for them, the average person living there ends up taking longer to get to places than they would have living in a carless society.[6]<\/a><\/p>\n
The Utopia movement, meanwhile, was originally created by a small group of young socialists from the south of France, heavily influenced by the writings of Andr\u00e9 Gorz and Dominique M\u00e9da. They created a reflection group at the left of the party, which became an inter-left parties\u2019 think tank and publishing house, with organized members in each of the main political parties of the Left in France. It quickly turned out, however, that the majority of its members were not part of any traditional political party, and it thus became the popular education movement it is today, officially independent of all political parties. It has not given up however on its intent to invite Left leaning people to work together beyond party lines, and in that has foreshadowed the emergence of the NUPES (New Ecologic and Social Popular Union), the current alliance of Left parties forged for the last French parliamentary elections.<\/p>\n
Andr\u00e9 Gorz, Political Ecology, and Degrowth<\/h1>\n
We are extremely fortunate to welcome today Fran\u00e7oise Gollain, who studied with Alain Caill\u00e9 long before she became the world\u2019s foremost specialist of the work of Andr\u00e9 Gorz\u2014with whom she collaborated and exchanged regularly for the last ten years of his life. And we are even more privileged by the gift she made us of the first full English translation of her very personal homage to him, entitled simply \u201cAndr\u00e9, my teacher<\/a>\u201d\u2014a text that works amazingly well when read immediately after the short testimony of Alain Lipietz, \u201cAndr\u00e9 Gorz and our youth,\u201d to be contrasted with it.[7]<\/a><\/p>\n
Andr\u00e9 Gorz, whom you\u2019ll hear much about at Utopia 4\/13<\/a>, was born an Austrian Jew to a Catholic mother with Nazi sympathies. Sent to Switzerland as a teenager during World War II, he almost entirely forgot his mother tongue, and chose the French language. One can easily understand from this the immense intellectual affinity he felt with the existentialist philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre: with the idea that existence precedes essence, and that we are what we do, what we chose to be by doing it. Sartre gave him a laudatory preface to his first novel, The Traitor<\/em>, a deeply personal auto-analysis written in the third person and published in 1957 to acclaim. He then became a mud-cracking journalist for the newly created newspaper of Le Nouvel Observateur<\/em>, reporting specifically on environmental catastrophes and social-environmental struggles from his existentialist Marxist perspective, which also imbued the books of political analysis and commentaries he began to publish on a regular basis: starting with his 1964 Strat\u00e9gies Ouvri\u00e8res et N\u00e9ocapitalisme <\/em>(published in English as A Strategy for Labor<\/em> in 1967)\u2014in which he famously introduced the notion of\u00a0 \u201cnon-reformist reforms\u201d or \u201crevolutionary reforms\u201d[8]<\/a>\u2014all the way to l\u2019Immateriel<\/em> (2003)[9]<\/a>, through a series of other important ones such as Les Adieux au Prol\u00e9tariat<\/em> (1980)[10]<\/a> and M\u00e9tamorphoses du travail, qu\u00eate du sens: Critique de la raison \u00e9conomique<\/em> (1988).[11]<\/a><\/p>\n
As Fran\u00e7oise explains exceedingly well, despite being a central intellectual reference of the second Left and intellectual father figure of political ecology, Gorz was also always, deep down, un \u00e9tranger<\/em>, a foreigner (much like Camus\u2019 character, except for the racist murder), deeply self-critical, and always prone to taking a step back. This made his relation to institutions, academia, and representative politics very special, as one of at once great intimacy and yet deeply marked by something of an unbridgeable gap. What Fran\u00e7oise, in a passage reminiscent of Chris Marker\u2019s remark on the politeness of the first person (as it says that \u201cI have only my self to offer\u201d) describes as:<\/p>\n
\nhis conflicting drives towards integration in the world on the one hand and refusal of the world on the other\u2014a dialectic at work throughout his life\u2014as well as his efforts to construct a place for himself, even if it was to remain a marginal one. Showing explicitly and openly the inadequacy of the intellectual, or at least of some of them, Andr\u00e9 made me accept the idea that I could be one.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
This combination of great intimacy and fundamental separation, with which Fran\u00e7oise entirely identifies as her experience of coming from a poor family and having become an intellectual, we find it described with great accuracy, but from the other side<\/em>, by Alain Lipietz, the career academic and career politician.<\/p>\n
But what makes this special relationship all the more interesting to understand and useful to get a feel of, is the way in which it embodies perfectly the essence of \u201cPolitical Ecology\u201d as a political movement. For we could argue that Political Ecology is at once a movement and a moment in the history of thought, in which humanity, coming to term with the existence of threats to its very existence, begins to organize in order to face them. Yet here what interest us it the political movement, and in particular its European expression. Here in Europe at least, Political Ecology as a movement was arguably born from the acceptance by some \u201cclassical anarchist\u201d (i.e. libertarian-socialist) of the necessity to make compromises with the liberal, representative-democratic system (of the bourgeoisie) in order to provide answers to the urgencies of the rise of multiple extinction-level kinds of existential threats (from nuclear apocalypse to environmental transformation making earth unfit for human life).<\/p>\n
In that context, the peculiar relation of Gorz to institutions of academia and representative politics embodies extremely well that of the Political Ecology movement in general to these forms of institutions. Gorz, in other words, inhabited precisely that space, which is also that of the questions raised by the very notion of \u201cnon reformist\u201d \/ \u201crevolutionary\u201d reforms, as well as by that of \u201cDegrowth.\u201d It should not be surprising, therefore, to find that Gorz also coined that latter term, in a conference he organized in 1972 for Le Nouvel Observateur<\/em> and to which he invited Herbert Marcuse (thus beginning an intimate friendship that lasted until the death of the latter, as recently examined by Clara Ruault<\/a> and Christophe Fourel).[12]<\/a> Unused for a number of years, degrowth was chosen in 2004 to become the \u201cpunch word\u201d title of the newspaper of the main anti-advertising and anti-consumerist movement in France, then becoming a polarizing slogan for a vast and diverse movement united in its recognition of Gorz as an intellectual father figure.<\/p>\n
It is the various shades of the concrete utopian side of this movement which we are going to explore at Utopia 4\/13, through the contribution of Alex from Longo Ma\u00ef; Camille from the ZAD; and Frederic Bosquet from TERA.<\/p>\n
Longo Ma\u00ef, the ZADists, and TERA<\/h1>\n
The Longo Ma\u00ef<\/a> cooperatives began the exact same year that Gorz organized the conference during which he coined the term \u201cDegrowth.\u201d<\/p>\n
The notion of ZAD is born from the detournement of an administrative acronym, that of \u201cZone d\u2019Am\u00e9nagement Diff\u00e9r\u00e9\u201d (zone of deferred construction), which referred to an area near the city of Nantes on France\u2019s Atlantic Coast that was administratively set aside for the construction of a new airport in the 1950s. However, the combination of local resistance and of the economic crisis of the 1970s put that costly project to rest, and the zone ended up in a sort of administrative limbo. When the project was relaunched, the opposition to it was rekindled as well, and the zone which had become a sort of natural preserve was renamed by the opponents of the airport project \u201cZone \u00e0 D\u00e9fendre\u201d (Zone to be defended). This notion was then taken up and applied to all the resistances to other \u201cGrands Projets Inutiles Impos\u00e9s\u201d, or GPII (literally Great Useless Imposed Projects)<\/p>\n
Finally, TERA is a more recent project of setting up a cooperative eco village near Bordeaux (also on the Atlantic coast of France, but a bit more to the south).<\/p>\n
Notes<\/h1>\n
[1]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Valery civilisations < http:\/\/www.historyguide.org\/europe\/valery.html<\/a> ><\/p>\n
[2]<\/a> \u00a0\u00a0 Venus forming “Hawkins < https:\/\/www.livescience.com\/
59693-could-earth-turn-into- venus.html#:~:text=Earth% 20could%20turn%20into%20a, where%20global%20warming% 20becomes%20irreversible<\/a>. >. See Also <\u00a0https:\/\/www.vox.com\/science- and-health\/22807575\/venus-hot- hellscape-climate-change-earth<\/a>\u00a0>, and note also that if a very strong case can be made that, in the words of Frank White, who conducted interview with a great many astronauts : “War and space exploration are alternative uses of the assertive, exploratory energies that are so characteristic of human beings. They may also be mutually exclusive because if one occurs on a massive scale, the other probably will not.” (see: generally the space option: an alternative to war <\u00a0https:\/\/thespaceoption.com\/ the_space_option_an_ alternative_to_war\/<\/a>\u00a0> ; and The moral equivalent of war: a new metaphor for space resource utilization <\u00a0https:\/\/www.thespacereview. com\/article\/4345\/1#:~:text=In% 20his%20book%20Pentagon%20of, of%20destruction%20in%20the% 20future<\/a>\u00a0> ), settling on the desolated rock with no atmosphere and much lower gravity than earth that is Mars, of all places, is quite clearly an absurd and unsustainable goal. Much more could be learned about earth by going to Venus instead, where we could set up a city in the clouds using zepplin like baloons filled with regular earth air (see generally : Welcome to Cloud City : Why future generations may prefer floating above Venus to colonizing Mars <\u00a0https:\/\/mashable.com\/ feature\/venus-mars-space- exploration<\/a>\u00a0> ; and <\u00a0https:\/\/www.space.com\/venus- death-of-a-planet-documentary- series-magellan.html<\/a>\u00a0> … bearing in mind that, as George Carlin put it : “men are from earth. women are from earth. Deal with it.” <\u00a0https:\/\/parade.com\/1080754\/ jessicasager\/george-carlin- quotes\/<\/a>\u00a0>).”<\/p>\n <\/div>\n[3]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 See adam something\u2019s video on Egypt\u2019s new capital < https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=WUK0K5mdQ_s<\/a> >\u00a0; and Paul Valery\u2019s cemetery by the sea < https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/issues\/2020\/4\/the-cemetery-by-the-sea<\/a> ><\/p>\n
[4]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Ref programme UE site convivialistes < https:\/\/convivialisme.org\/2022\/09\/15\/utopia-2022\/<\/a> ><\/p>\n
[5]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Graeber maussketeers < https:\/\/inthesetimes.com\/issue\/24\/19\/graeber2419.html<\/a> ><\/p>\n
[6]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Ivan Illich, La Convivialit\u00e9<\/p>\n
[7]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cf. Andr\u00e9 my teacher < https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/utopia1313\/francoise-gollain-andre-my-teacher\/<\/a> >\u00a0; and Alain Lipietz, Andr\u00e9 Gorz and our youth < http:\/\/lipietz.net\/IMG\/pdf\/AndreGorz_en.pdf<\/a> ><\/p>\n
[8]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 See the excellent piece about the concept\u2019s origins and its contemporary reappropriation by the abolitionnist movement, published by the Engler Brothers in Jacobin < http:\/\/thisisanuprising.org\/2021\/10\/07\/andre-gorz-and-the-path-between-reform-and-revolution\/<\/a> ><\/p>\n
[9]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 L\u2019immat\u00e9riel, Galil\u00e9e, 2003, eng. trans. The Immaterial, xxx, 2010<\/p>\n
[10]<\/a>\u00a0 Les Adieux au Prol\u00e9tariat, Galil\u00e9e, 1980, eng. trans. Farewell to the working class, xxx, 1994<\/p>\n
[11]<\/a>\u00a0 M\u00e9tamorphoses du Travail: Critique de la raison \u00e9conomique, Galil\u00e9e, 1988, eng. trans. A critique of Economic reason, xxx, 1989<\/p>\n
[12]<\/a>\u00a0 See generally Ecologie & r\u00e9volution: Pacifier l\u2019Existence (Andr\u00e9 Gorz Herbert Marcuse, un dialogue critique) < https:\/\/www.lespetitsmatins.fr\/collections\/essais\/283–ecologie-et-revolution-pacifier-l-existence.html<\/a> ><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By T\u00e9l\u00e9maque Masson-R\u00e9cipon \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u201cWe\u2019re so\u00a0self-important, so self-important. Everybody\u2019s gonna save something now: \u201cSave the trees! Save the bees! Save the whales! Save those snails!\u201d and the greatest arrogance of all: \u201cSave the planet!\u201d What?! Are these fucking… Continue Reading