#title Catastrophism
#subtitle Disaster Management & Long-lasting Servitude
#author René Riesel
Jaime Semprun
#SORTauthors René Riesel ;Jaime Semprun;
#date 2009
#source [[https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/381-summer-fall-2009/catastrophism]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2014-04-24
#notes Fifth Estate #381, Summer-Fall 2009
In these excerpts from their book, Catastrophisme, administration du desastre et soumission durable, René Riesel and Jaime Semprun warn against State-administered management of the global ecological and social crisis.
Riesel is an activist who destroyed GMO seeds at Monsanto’s facility as well as author of Du progres dans la domestication. Semprun, a major contributor to the influential French journal Encyclopedie des Nuisances, first pointed out many of the sinister aspects of planet-saving when it is carried out under the joint venture of Capital and the State.
For a revolutionary theory to be worthy of its name it must provide an analysis of social reality that is at least plausible and it must be able to identify principal points of attack in an effort to transform society.
The truth criterion for such an analysis is not exactly the same as for scientific theories: being “relevant,” conforming to the facts is not good enough; it must also focus the unhappiness and dissatisfaction of a certain period on where to apply the theory. Clearly we have nothing even approaching this today.
Even when attempts at theoretical analysis are not simply absurd or wildly arbitrary, they still are unable to design a practice or objective (even a long-term one), unable to say where one’s efforts should be concentrated, not so much to bring down established society since it will fall by itself, but a way for collective activity to oppose it so as to have some chance of stopping the destruction of the planet.
Critical analyses that stress the fundamental industrial nature of current society undoubtedly summarize most of its qualities better than others do, and what they identify is both the most universal and concrete. But don’t fetishize this statement: underlying this evaluation is the clear understanding that this industrial society is also capitalist, market-dependant, spectacle-driven, hierarchic, and technical.
It also includes the emphasis from the 1960s that insisted that the recent increase in alienation denoted by the term “spectacle” did not imply abandoning a critique of capitalism, but on the contrary, reformulated this critique in terms that make it possible to do something about alienation.
In any case, the anti-industrial critique, as brief as some of its formulations are, already has the merit of satisfying one of the necessary conditions for a theory to be subversive: namely, according to a connoisseur, of being “completely unacceptable,” in that it labels “the very core of the existing world to be bad, thereby arousing the indignant incredulity of everyone who finds it good.” [Guy Debord in Preface a la quatrieme edition italienne de ‘La Societe du Spectacle ].
A critique that would expose industrial society as a closed world that imprisons us must necessarily remain sketchy in trying to say how to attack this “center” in that it has to insist on the fact that the center of this hideous sphere is, in fact, nowhere because its circumference is everywhere; and we are constantly running into it. (Inverted, this provides another old and very suggestive metaphor).
Unless we continue to postulate the existence of a class, the proletariat, whose central place in production makes it a revolutionary subject, it is not at all clear how, realistically, given the coherence of the restraints imposed by the industrial system, it could be ended other than its self-destruction (undoubtedly well underway, but hypothetically still distant enough).
And, after the damage has become so great, we confront the question of resources--and not only natural resources--that humanity will retain in order to reconstruct the world on another basis. In other words, what condition will people be in, what condition are they in already, drained as they are from inflicting the system on themselves, while toughening themselves so as to endure it?
It is possible to argue that a worsening of the catastrophe will sweep away all the conditioning, and humanity’s best energies will be galvanized, but the opposite is also possible, the catastrophe, generating panic, will precipitate a descent into barbarism, One can speculate endlessly about this and formulate dogmatic statements, but they will remain mere opinions, beliefs or “personal convictions” having no foundation or significance.
If no theory can be found to respond to such a question, it is simply because this is not a theoretical question, even if it is the crucial question of the time.