(Daemian cont.)
The politics of sacrifice. Malthus happily allowing the Irish to starve.
Not embarking on a hegemonic struggle as to what constitutes the good life.
Moving beyond sacrifice.
The gift raised as a potential terrain of thought.
The gift has generated lots of nice specific anthropological studies on its importance in generating stuff on material objects as social relations. But how is the gift taken up in political theory?
Mutualism. Long standing interest in the idea that gift economies could be a third zone of social possibility to the market and the plan. Broad domain of inquiry.
Associationalists, Proudhonians, communitarians, left anarchists: broad sense that top down socialism wasn't going to function. Bottom up need instead.
Mutualism. Within this terrain there were quite a lot of attitudes to the state and the market. Completely obliterate or coexist.
Self-organizing possibilities now present in all kinds of discourses. Liberal+conservative discourse in Britain. Sharing. Hawken etc. Natural Capitalism. Local economic trading schemes.
Default politics of post-socialist progressive space. But not a lot of reflection about problems encountered in the past. “Stuff is exploding.” Why not reflect on why it didn't fulfill its capacities in the late nineteenth century?
New president of Sociology Association. Theme of conference is utopianism and alternatives. Envisaging real world utopias. Very concrete almost wonky left political scientists to do work on e.g. community controlled police force. Closes down many groups in the way he frames it.
Murray Bookchin and Colin Ward. Bookchin's Our Synthetic Environment much broader than Silent Spring. He became very angry and so people have trouble engaging with him. Bookchin wanted to argue for post-scarcity abundance. Not sacrifice.
Much more than individuals and appetites, but desire and possibility. The terms of people's life and what constitutes pleasure. We would get much further with that.
Eco technologies. “Towards a Liberatory Technology.” We need a future technological settlement that is restorative of the environment but also of personal and community autonomy.
Clearly there are problems. Drift from 60s 70s ideal of distributed urban settlements to focus on density and the life and death of great cities. vs “Hey let's replicate the college town everywhere...”
More pluralized vision of urban ecological life. Need for state and private capital as major actor in this.
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