Anarchocyclist

I was inspired today by the list of Core Beliefs on Insurgent American. It combines nicely with their 35 point practical guide for action.it’s inspired me to learn more about some pieces that i hadn’t thought of as connected before, but i now see as part of a whole strategy for social change.

My political education began with Free Software, thanks to the excellent writings of Richard Stallman. He taught me that to make a good society, we all need the ability to make decisions about the software that influences increasing portions of our lives. My awareness then expanded to other issues, and i began to see patriarchy, white supremacy and capitalism as part of an interconnected whole that i had to oppose. Lately i’m learning more about how to do that within a context of Peak Oil and climate disaster, and thanks to some visionaries like Stan Goff and others, i’m starting to see how that fits into the connected whole with my previous viewpoints. Creating a non-hierarchical society is inseparable from creating a feminist anti-racist sustainable low-energy society.

Firstly, no matter what, our energy usage will necessarily go down. We’re entering the long decline of fossil fuels, referred to by some as Peak Oil. The main idea is that fossil fuels are finite, and all the really big oilfields have already been discovered. Oil production in any region follows something similar to a bell curve. it goes up as new discoveries are brought into production, eventually peaks, and then begins a steady decline as fewer and fewer discoveries are made and production falls as current wells start to run out of easily accessible oil. In the 1950s, there was a guy named Hubbard who worked for Shell Oil in the USA, and by observing the rate of new discoveries of oil, he predicted that production of oil in the USA would peak in 1971. At the time he was demonized, but now we can see that he was only off by 1 year; US oil production in the lower 48 states peaked in 1970 and has been in decline ever since then.

We can apply this same principle to the entire world by looking at the decline in new discoveries worldwide. Various estimates for the peak of production have been given, ranging from “a couple years ago” to “a few years from now” to “nah, it won’t happen for a while” (guess which prediction comes from the major oil companies!). As some of you learned in first-year economics class, we encounter a problem when demand for oil starts exceeding available supply. As the supply steadily drops at about 3% per year after the peak, and demand continues growing like it still is (especially with the current insane pace of development in China), demand will cross supply and the price of oil will skyrocket.

With this in mind, step back for a moment and consider global warming. There’s only a certain amount of excess carbon that our atmosphere can handle before things really go to shit (more than they have already). That amount of carbon is, according to some calculations, much less than the amount of carbon in the remaining oil and gas reserves. In order to not totally fuck up the planet, we have to stop using fossil fuels much before they actually run out. Governments won’t likely consider this in their decision-making, but Peak Oil will definitely be in their calculations.

What does this mean for the rest of us? I think there are several options for the overall trend in the next few years as oil supply declines. One is that the imperialist countries will invade the oil producing countries to grab control of the oil supply, and they’ll try to make sure that their supply is kept up, at the expense of the poorer countries. This will prevent the peak from impacting the northern populations of those imperialist countries by shifting the burden onto the less powerful. After this, the decline will inevitably reach everywhere and the hierarchy will become more pronounced as the rich try to hold onto whatever is left.

Opposed to this increasing hierarchy will be the rest of us, with our vision of equality. The only way we can ensure a non-hierarchical future is to transform the way we live in order to match the “Energy Descent”. If our lifestyles continue to reflect the artificial energy subsidy we get from oil, then we rocket towards option 1. On the other hand, starting the transition to low-energy living actually fits right in with a project for radical democracy. The two are inseparable.

Building local radical democracy means that we need political autonomy, and for that we need economic autonomy. Women who are violently assaulted by their husbands sometimes have trouble leaving because of lack of economic autonomy, and sometimes because of various emotional attachments. Perhaps it is similar with our high-energy oil-subsidized society. Our food is produced using industrial agriculture (requiring vast amounts of oil) and then shipped to us from thousands of miles away (again using vast amounts of oil) and in order to buy it in our town, the town has to produce things to export (using oil) to get the currency with which to purchase the food that is no longer grown locally. We’re addicted to oil, and our local economy is not independent from the global titans of trade. In order to make our own rational choices about energy and food, and to make radical democracy bloom, we have to separate ourselves from those far away sources of financial power and become autonomous. This is what we’d have to do anyway, even if oil weren’t in decline and if it were going to stay at constant price forever….but it’s decidedly more urgent to do this now that we know oil is declining and the price is skyrocketing.

Just as patriarchy reinforces women’s dependence on men, and radical feminism frees women to participate in radical action, so too does the industrial system and neoliberal economy reinforce all of our dependancy on work and international currency earnings, and organized energy descent will free us for radical action. In our consumerist society, everyone seems to dream of owning several cars, having a big green lawn out front of their big house, and consuming all sorts of electronic gadgets and exotic foods. This puts them on the treadmill of having to work all the time for big companies to get the money they need to pay off their credit card debts. Debt deradicalizes people. It causes us to choose obedience and Work over radical action, because of the threat of getting arrested and having a criminal record. We have to mentally justify our own choices to “work for the man” in order to earn “just a little bit more” to sustain our unsustainable lifestyles. Energy descent and radical democracy are the solution.

As an example, take the story of General Motors in Flint, Michigan, as illustrated by Michael Moore’s first film “Roger and Me”. In the film, he shows the effects of General Motors cutting 30000 jobs in the city of Flint, and the ensuing aftermath. With tens of thousands jobless, the economy collapses and thousands flee the city. Crime increases dramatically, and yet the rich are still out enjoying themselves at the country club and proclaim that the jobless people are just too lazy to work! As i watched the movie again last week, i started thinking about what other possibilities the former autoworkers had. First i thought that maybe they could barter for things, start local cooperatives, start a local currency, etc. But then i realized that the city of Flint doesn’t produce basic necessities anymore, like food. All the coops, barter, and local currencies in the world can’t stop the problem of not having any food to buy. They still needed cold hard cash to flow out of the town to buy food and other necessities, which means they’d also have to do the kinds of economic activities that would bring that cash back into the community. Stirring the cash around within the community would not work because they were not autonomous. They were dependent on high-energy industrial agriculture and shipping methods that use oil to bring them their goods.

What if, instead, Flint had gone the way of Cuba and developed local production of organic food using low-energy permaculture methods? They could gain their economic independence and not have to rely on tourism and manufacturing to get that currency, and would not be beholden to the corporate giants for employment decisions. Herein lies the answer that we’re all going to have to face in the coming decline of oil. To make the necessary autonomous political decisions, we have to free ourselves from the external (and local) capitalists. Local capitalism won’t save us either, because capitalism is a grow-or-die system. All the solutions that the local chamber of commerce can think up are all based on “growth”. We know that in a finite world we can’t grow forever. In a city with less and less oil to grease the gears, capitalism will certainly not be able to grow.

“Ok, fine”, you might say, “but what about alternative energy sources to sustain our current situation?”. The answer is that most people really aren’t aware of how much of a subsidy fossil fuels give us. Solar and wind power are decades away from being able to supply that much power, and industrial agriculture takes 10x as much energy in fossil fuel as it produces in food energy. This means biofuels are out of the question because they currently benefit from the fossil fuel subsidy. until we can produce food without using industrial farming techniques, biofuels are also out of the question. Everything we eat, everything we use, everything we buy has some sort of connection to fossil fuel energy input. Energy plateau is not possible. Energy descent is our only choice. Industrial monoculture agribusiness has to go, and must be replaced by low-energy local initiatives.

Ok, so here’s my vision of how it might go down. We start by relearning the skills we’ve collectively lost, like growing our own food and preserving it for the winter. As we do this, we organize to teach each other how to live with less energy. We can build our communities through teaching each other and sharing the bounties of our gardens. Along with this, we start to build up local decision-making and radical democracy. We start with decisions on how to change things in the community to be more sustainable, and we work our way up through all of the political and economic decisions that need to be made in our city.

Through producing things locally, we gain more and more economic independence for each other, and this leads to more and more political autonomy for our radical democracy movement. It also works against the “race to the bottom” trend of buying ever cheaper foreign sweatshop produced goods from walmart. As Dr. Vandana Shiva explains in this talk at a UK soil conference, by producing food locally in the North, we will help farmers in the south to gain autonomy from agribusiness. As more local food is produced using far less energy and fewer long-distance inputs, less foreign currency is needed and local currency systems can become more effective. As local currency and low-energy living become more prevalent, we can work less and more easily organize anti-capitalist economic systems, ridding ourselves completely of the ideas of “currency” and “property”. Through this, we become more closely connected with our community and our work becomes less alienating. We start to eliminate the sharp division between “land for nature” and “land for production”. As Curtis White says, “the map of natural preservation and the map of economic activity would be one map.” Destruction happens when people are separated from responsibility. When you’re an obedient cog in the machine, you “just do your job”. When you buy something without knowing how it was produced, by whom, using what materials and what resources, you’re giving up responsibility and enabling yourself to do something evil because of that separation. This is alienation. alienation allows us to perform destructive acts. without alienation, destruction is difficult..it takes effort, and doesn’t serve a purpose.

As political radicals, it’s our responsibility to steer this energy descent away from individualism and the tendency to “run for the hills”. Some people will want to run away and have their own “rugged individual” cabins out in the woods or something, and we have to build community instead. We also have to give up the old ideas of organizing factory workers into industrial unions as the old syndicalists thought in the early 1900s. If high-energy industry is in decline, so is the power of the industrial worker. Instead we should focus on radical feminism and the revolutionary potential of women to move forward this process of community building and energy descent (see also this article: “Political forces control people’s access to food by permitting corporate interests to profit from delocalization by encouraging food hegemony. Feminist food praxis thus requires an examination of women’s power in relation to the food system.”). Women have always had to get by with low-energy methods and the skills of self-sufficiency when men monopolized the available resources. We can start this process now by reviving and sharing those skills. Start a garden, start a gardening team, take your gardening team around the city to help other people build gardens, like is being done in “Permablitzing” in australia. This becomes revolutionary when we can reproduce those structures in parallel. Each group starts two new groups, which in turn each start two more.

I’m starting to lose steam in this article now. I have a final exam in my chinese class tomorrow, so i really should be studying that right now instead of reading all sorts of interesting articles on the web. I’d rather be ripping up some lawns and planting veggies, but it’ll have to wait. In the mean time, i’d love to hear your thoughts on this issue.

Ride hard, ride free

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 9th, 2007 at 01:12 am and is filed under Front Page, Politics, energy descent, food, gardening, gender. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.