1.
We – we commoners, we who have been born and impressed into capitalist modernity without our consent and who must participate in its reproduction and endure the resulting extinction machine from all our diverse and unequal places and contexts – find ourselves in a situation that is both unacceptable and absurd.
We belong (unwillingly? indifferently? unconsciously?) to a globalized society that knows it is cooking the planet and ruining the common biosphere and yet does not (cannot? refuses to?) cease and desist racing itself to death – and not only that, but this society, late capitalist modernity, takes every opportunity, from faster and more powerful computing chips to machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), to accelerate the process of ruination.
2.
As any commoner can see, every nation that can is, at this moment, doing three very alarming things:
1) going all-in again on new fossil fuel extraction;
2) arming up for war at all possible speed; and
3) going all-in on AI.
The justifications given, when they are given at all, are the platitudes of capitalist realism: there is no alternative to late capitalist modernity and its geopolitical national-security logics – or at least no alternative that does not put the nation-state at risk of extinction.
Read: that does not risk abolishing the national ruling classes.
If we – the oligarchs and subordinate ruling classes – do not extract hydrocarbons to run our war-machines, if we do not massively grow those war machines, if we do not wield lethal autonomous weapons and use AI to weaponize gene editing, then our enemies alone will do so and, in doing so, will be supreme and, wielding the power to crush our war machines, crush our nation-states, and crush us, will hold us hostage to terror.
A rigorously implacable and unanswerable logic – so long as one remains in the vicious circles of capitalist realism and geopolitical strategic thinking.
By such arguments, the known, observed, and experienced evidence of planetary heating and biospheric meltdown, as well as all the ruinous social fallouts, are ignored or blithely bracketed for later, later, later, or perhaps, and more likely, not at all.
3.
Late capitalist modernity’s energy problems, which unfold implacably and unanswerably from the laws of thermodynamics, entropy, and toxicity, will not be acknowledged or confronted because all ruling classes understand that without unending and accelerating growth and expansion, extraction and accumulation, capitalist modernity would cease to exist and the game (party?) would be over.
The requirements of late capitalist modernity’s energetics and metabolism degrade and ruin the conditions of life on earth – that is the terminal, necropolitical (implacable and unanswerable) turning of the modernist screw.
Planet, evolution, and geological time do not care if capitalist realism and geopolitical logic form the code of an extinction machine driven in vicious circles – but commoners should care very much about that.
Caring very much about it is a material interest, a reason, and a feeling-structure that make commoners out of late capitalist-modernist consumer subjects.
Put otherwise: commoners, situated today within the vicious circles described above – and however else they may be situated – are those who, grasping the urgent need to break with these modernist logics, are searching and reaching for alternatives to capitalist modernity and geopolitical strategy.
4.
From the perspective of the now endangered Holocene community of earthly life, of which humans are but a recent emergence, the alternative to capitalist realism is obvious: biospheric realism, which puts the needs and livability of the whole community of life, human and more-than-human, above the needs of extractivist and exploitative capital accumulation – and indeed which compels all social forms and projects to align themselves with livability, full stop.
From this clarifying perspective, capitalist realism, eating its own tail, racing itself to death, must be seen implacably and unanswerably as unrealistic, as the very image of irrealism – that is, the absurd.
From the perspective of earthly life and biospheric realism, the alternative to geopolitical strategy appears as equally clear and obvious, equally implacable and unanswerable: instead of always seeking to augment national powers, check and dominate the power of rivals, and move up the imperialist pecking order, the new imperative is to support livability through mutuality.
And to do this without regard for the system of nation-states, which can generate no solution for their dilemmas and polycrisis, from the corruption of democracy, the resurgence of fascism, and the perpetual wars of climate imperialism, to planetary toxification and the Sixth Extinction.
5.
This is why commoners, those who make up the emergent class formation in this polycrisis, will sooner or later recognize themselves as commoners: the ancient, mutualist, and ecological mottos of commoning are simply All in common and Commoners, all.
Commoners will understand their task: to rescue Livability.
If the commoners were many and strong enough, this task would entail disarming, powering down, and abolishing capitalist modernity, so that the new pattern – the pluriverse of a Commons of Commons, a planetary commons ecology – could coalesce and consolidate.
To get there from here would be a dangerous and risky passage – but less dangerous and risky than pressing on with the failed project of capitalist modernity, which, having lost its claims to be the most realistic of options, has lost any possible justification.
That this passage involves a class struggle is also clear enough: as the global modernist oligarchs and subsidiary ruling classes are the enforcers of the vicious circles, their intransigent hands must be removed from the levers of the extinction machine.
6.
Late modernist politics does not provide any political pathway for disarmament, powering-down (degrowth, post-growth) or the abolition or self-abolition of the oligarchic ruling classes; but saying this is merely to affirm that a vicious circle is a vicious circle.
For Livability to be rescued, there must be a rupture with business-as-usual – either from within the extinction machine, through the collective agency of commoners, from below, or else from outside of the machine.
At this moment, which is not to say that this will always be the case, the latter seems more probable: the agencies of the planet itself and its processes have in the past decade been registering their own indictment, rejection and “practical critique” of late capitalist modernity – an indictment, rejection, and critique that will only become more forceful (implacable and unanswerable) in the years ahead.
And yet, commoners can take heart on several grounds.
First, their case for the alternatives being realistic, as well as implacable, unanswerable, and confirmed daily by experience, their numbers are growing: the difficulties and hardships of survivance nudge and spur us all towards mutuality and collaboration.
Animated by ancient and ecological principles as well as by necessity, commoners are not a mere multitude; commoning today is becoming a project of (biospheric, more-than-human) justice and a vector of decommodification that leads out of class society and capitalist property.
Put differently: commoning aims at collective self-liberation from the general enslavement to the needs of capitalist-modernist technologies.
Second, in the transition to commons ecologies in the ruins of capitalist modernity and its nation-states, the planet is the ally and teacher of commoners.
To ask what it would mean to live and act as a part of the biosphere, in need of and with responsibility to all the other parts, is already a break with capitalist realism and geopolitical strategy.
7.
Third, there may be another ally, a monstrous one, within the extinction machine itself.
The Grid, the smartphone and its world, the global algorithmic financial system, AI and its data centers and supercomputers, and all the critical mineral supply chains required by the war machines, as well as by everyday life in the digital era, are all now acknowledged to be critical infrastructures – irreducibly necessary and inseparable components of national military, geopolitical, and economic power.
This means that geopolitical strategy, increasingly informed and guided by AI, must, in a context of escalating conflict, designate these critical infrastructures as a primary target.
In Ukraine, Putin has attacked these infrastructures with relative restraint; in Gaza, however, Netanyahu has obliterated them thoroughly: these are the laboratories and indicators of future warfare.
To the extent that critical infrastructures are taken down by cyberwar and AI-guided missile and drone swarms, late capitalist modernity directly attacks (yet again) its own conditions of possibility.
Here is the real meaning of “the intensification of all antagonisms”: late capitalist modernity races itself to death because AI, implacably and unanswerably following the vicious circles of geopolitical algorithms, must target itself.
8.
At the center of the vicious circles, a declining hegemon (USA) fears the rise of its rival (China) and all wait for the strategic moment in which attack can check this rise (or, from the other side, can secure it); who but AI, running the probabilities like automatic chess- and Go-players, will be empowered to determine this moment – and what will the first strike be, if not against critical infrastructure?
If present processes of ruination accelerate and escalate to actualize such scenarios, the results will be abysmal; even so, commoners, needing these infrastructures less than the oligarchic ruling classes, should not be in terror of this contingency.
It may be that liberation from these modernist infrastructures (and their world) can only come via their destruction, by whatever agency.
Meanwhile, commoning, a mutualist re-skilling for Livability, will be what it always was: communal subsistence and survivance by means of mutualist practices – a subnational and non-state mode of production, social reproduction, and uncommodified social enjoyment.
Six years ago, Mark Burton and Peter Somerville concluded their rigorous defense of degrowth with two scrupulously honest sentences; after pointing out the implacable, unanswerable biospheric case for degrowth, as against versions of green-growth eco-modernism, they wrote then: “How degrowth might happen, we don’t know. A fortuitous combination of popular struggle and collapse of the capitalist system is perhaps the only route” (New Left Review 115, 2019).
9.
If this is right, and if AI will prove a monstrous ally in the way indicated, then commoners are pushed by biospheric realism and material realities toward a monstrous version of accelerationism.
For me this is an appalling result, but one that emerges from the rational core of commoning in this context.
I end with two points: first, we – we commoners – can remember that this is not a result we have chosen, out of an absolute freedom of movement and choice, but is rather a monstrous irony imposed on us by the intransigence of the global oligarchs and their national ruling classes.
We, after all, were not the motivated pushers of AI who inflicted it on the world, suppressing any serious public debate and overcoming all remnants of democratic control; if we now describe the tendencies and consequences from the perspective of biospheric realism, we are neither the cause nor the effect, for it is not our hands on the algorithmic triggers.
Commoners seeking to rescue Livability will have to take things as they find them and find the courage to do so.
One place they will find that courage, among countless others, is Leslie Marmon Silko’s great novel of indigenous accelerationism, Almanac of the Dead; another is Gerald Vizenor’s great novel of indigenous survivance, Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57.
These works should be added to every commoner’s reading list, next to the works of Peter Linebaugh, Silvia Federici, Massimo De Angelis, Fred Moten, and Anna Tsing.
10.
Capitalist realism insists that the end of capitalism can only be imagined as the end of the world.
But, and this is the second point, there have been, and still are, many worlds, and we commoners have already survived the end of many of them.
In the same way, we – we commoners, together with the more-than-human we of the Holocene community of life – will survive the end of late capitalist modernity and its world-destroying technologies.
The end of the world of late capitalist modernity is not necessarily or even implacably the end of all worlds or the end of “civilization” tout court.
How far we commoners can rescue Livability in that ending is what is at stake; the “answer” will only be found through the doing and trying, the actions, solidarities, and practices in common cause, the making and growing in common of commoning in the ruins of the extinction machine.
