“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Friday, January 15, 2016

Humankind 3: Emotion

I wasn't expecting this. I wasn't expecting writing this book to bring up this huge surge of emotion. I'm on the edge of crying, not because of feeling sad either. Then sometimes I want to jump up and down, sometimes I want to shout.

I think maybe this book is connecting with feelings that I really adore, such as solidarity and courage. They tend to be the ones that strongly set me off.

Haha I even found myself playing “World in Motion” by New Order while thinking about it today. You have to be in a special mood for that. My band Senser used to cover it a bit. Did you ever see 24 Hour Party People? Some of that was my teens. Has that tune at one point, at the Hacienda.

It was going to be called “E for England” hahahaha :)

But also it's super integrative, like these different parts of my intellectual development joining up and talking with each other, so it's kind of inner solidarity as well.

Here's how my work differs from previous mashups of Marxism with ecology.

1. It's so not saying It's already in the Marx, look: because it so isn't. Or rather it is, but in a shadow, flip side spectral way. Not a John Bellamy Foster way.

2. It's not condescending like It would be nice to include nonhumans just as the New Left included gender and race. It's not like Marxism could do this out of the goodness of its heart.

3. It's actually saying (gulp), this is what it's actually saying: Marxism only works if it includes nonhumans. ! The anthropocentrism is a bug, not a feature.

(3) means that it's super philosophical and theoretical: arguing from the inside out rather than trying to tack things on to the outside.




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