8,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
Under what conditions could ecology, instead of being one cluster of movements among others, organise politics around an agenda and a set of beliefs? Can ecology aspire to define the political horizon in the way that liberalism, socialism, conservatism and other political ideologies have done at various times and places? What can ecology learn from history about how new political movements emerge, and how they win the struggle for ideas long before they translate their ideas into parties and elections? In this short text, consisting of seventy-six talking points, Bruno Latour and Nikolaj Schultz argue that if the ecological movement is to gain ideological consistency and autonomy it must offer a political narrative that recognises, embraces and effectively represents its project in terms of social conflict. Political ecology must accept that it brings along division. It must provide a convincing cartography of the conflicts it generates and, based on this, it must try to define a common horizon of collective action. In order to represent and describe these conflicts, Latour and Schultz propose to reuse the old notions of 'class' and 'class struggle', albeit infused with a new meaning in line with the ecological concerns of our New Climate Regime. Advancing the idea of a new ecological class, assembled by its collective interests in fighting the logic of production and safeguarding our planet's conditions of habitability, they ask: how can a proud and self-aware ecological class emerge and take effective action to shape our collective future?
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 87
Ähnliche
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
The Authors
Memorandum
I: Class struggles and classification struggles
II: A prodigious extension of materialism
III: The great turnaround
IV: A class that’s legitimate again
V: A misalignment of affects
VI: A different sense of history in a different cosmos
VII: The ecological class is potentially in the majority
VIII: The indispensable and too often abandoned battle of ideas
IX: Winning power, but what kind?
X: Filling the emptiness of the public space from below
Postface Will ecology ever be politics as usual?
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
The Authors
Memorandum
Begin Reading
Postface Will ecology ever be politics as usual?
End User License Agreement
Pages
iii
iv
v
vi
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
On the Emergence of an Ecological Class – a Memo
Subject: How to promote the emergence of an ecological class that’s self-aware and proud
By: Bruno Latour and Nikolaj Schultz
Date: January 2022
To: Members of ecological parties and their present and future electors
Translated by: Julie Rose
polity
Originally published in French as Mémo sur la nouvelle classe écologique. Comment faire émerger une classe écologique consciente et fière d’elle-même. © Editions La Découverte, Paris, 2022
This English edition © Polity Press, 2022
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5507-9
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022939600
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
The Authors
Bruno Latour has been working for over fifteen years on issues of political philosophy relating to what he calls the New Climate Regime. Nikolaj Schultz is finishing a thesis in sociology at the University of Copenhagen on what he terms the geosocial classes. Neither has any official position in any of the existing ecological movements, but both are aware of the need to provide political expressions of ecology with a broader base than the one mobilised till now. This is what authorises these two authors to draw up here a provisional list of points that it’s important we reflect on together to amplify the multipronged action of activists and numerous political leaders. It’s written in the style of a memo, so you won’t find nuances or notes.
Memorandum
A note you jot down to make it easier to remember something; through metonymy, a notebook or exercise book in which you note what you want to recall.
A note on an important topic written by an embassy or consular diplomat setting out, for the government they’re posted to, the point of view of their own government on a given issue.
IClass struggles and classification struggles
1. Under what conditions can ecology organise politics around itself instead of just being one group of movements among others? Can it aspire to define the political horizon as did, at other times, liberalism followed by the various socialisms, then neoliberalism and finally, more recently, the illiberal or neofascist parties, whose influence seemingly never ceases to grow? Can it learn from social history how new political movements emerge and how they win the battle of ideas, well before being able to translate the advances they make into parties and elections?
2. Ecology urgently needs to acquire more coherence and more autonomy, given the collapse of the ‘international order’, the enormity of the catastrophe under way, and the general dissatisfaction with the political platform of the traditional parties as revealed by high levels of voter abstention. Now, if there are plenty of ecological movements out there and even parties that adopt ecology as their banner, these are nonetheless far from being movements or parties that define, in their own way and on their own terms, the battlefronts around them that would allow them to pinpoint the whole raft of allies and adversaries in the political landscape. Several decades after starting out, they remain dependent on the old divides, and this limits their search for alliances and diminishes the leeway they have. If it really wants to have any clout, political ecology must not let itself be defined by others, and must identify, by itself and for itself, the new sources of injustice it has spotted and the new battlefronts it has discovered.
3. Because it relied on concern for the nature that was known to Science and external to the social world, political ecology too long hinged on a pedagogical version of its action: once the catastrophic situation was known, action would necessarily follow. But it’s become clear that, far from putting an end to or diverting attention away from social conflicts, the call for ‘the protection of nature’ has, on the contrary, multiplied those conflicts. From the Gilets jaunes in France to the demonstrations of young people all over the place, via the protests of farmers in India, indigenous communities resisting fracking in North America, or the disputes over the impact of electric vehicles, the message is clear: conflicts are only proliferating. Talking about nature doesn’t mean signing a peace treaty; it means recognising the existence of a whole host of conflicts on all possible subjects involving everyday existence, at all scales and over all continents. Nature doesn’t unify – it divides.
4. Curiously, ecological concerns – in any case, those regarding climate, energy and biodiversity – have become ubiquitous. But the host of conflicts has not, for the moment anyway, taken the form of a general mobilisation the way the transformations triggered by liberalism and socialism were able to do in the past few centuries. Ecology, in this sense, is both everywhere and nowhere. For the moment, it seems that the immense diversity of conflicts is preventing these struggles from being given a coherent definition. Well, this diversity isn’t a flaw, it’s an asset. That’s because ecology is engaged in a general exploration of living conditions that have been destroyed by the obsession with production alone. For the ecological movement to gain in coherence and autonomy, and for this to be translated into a historic momentum comparable to what was seen in the past, its project needs to be recognised, embraced, understood and represented effectively by gathering all these conflicts into a single unity of action comprehensible to all. To do this, we first need to accept that ecology implies division; then to offer a convincing cartography of the new types of conflict it generates; and, lastly, to define a common horizon for collective action.
5. If it’s true that ecology is both everywhere and nowhere at once, it’s also true that, on the one hand, a conflict situation is opening up on all subjects, and, on the other, a sort of indifference, of irenicism, of expectation and bogus peace prevails. Each new publication put out by the IPCC produces impassioned reactions, but, as in operas, the marching songs, ‘March on, march on, before it’s too late!’, don’t shift the choruses on stage more than a few metres. ‘Everything has to change radically’, yet nothing changes. So, if it’s crucial that we recognise a generalised state of war, we still have to admit that, for the minute, it’s hard to draw up clear fronts between friends and enemies. On countless subjects, we are ourselves divided, both victims and accomplices at the same time. Whereas in the preceding century, they could draw up, if roughly, the class conflicts that allowed people to, say, vote for parties with recognisable ideologies, it’s hard to do that today as long as the state of ecological war has not been clarified. How can we talk about class conflict if the ecological class itself isn’t clearly defined?
6. It’s always a bit anxiety-making to reuse the notion of ‘class’. That’s why we need to resist the temptation to invoke the notion of ‘class struggle’ just like that, even while recognising that this notion was able to serve a major purpose, last century, by simplifying and unifying the various forms of mobilisation. Its advantage as a concept was to allow a delineation of the structure of the social and material world, by moving the political dynamics on in terms of social conflicts and of developing experiences and collective horizons. Its role over the course of history was clearly descriptive every bit as much as performative
