By Sebastian Fonseca Trujillo
The history of the commons is the history of its denial, damage and deterioration, but also its claim, conservation and protection. The wealth that environmental diversity, as well as the multiple ways in which its access, use and forms of property are expressed throughout history, can serve to overcome the environmental and civilizational crisis
The appropriation of common goods
Gregorio Table Paintings
The truths bother you because they are complex, because they do not accept unicausality and because it is easier to stick with the already known explanation. It is easier to say that humans are a "virus" that as soon as it ceases to exist would allow an idyllic revival of life on the planet than to question the historical points that have led to the environmental crisis. Dying is easier than living, not being than being. At present, movements with environmental pretensions seek to argue the need to eliminate thehomo sapiensof the world, under the pretext that we are destroying the Earth, based on a false chain of causality in which the mere existence of the human being is a conditionenoughto continue with the degradation of the globe. As will be argued here, rather than erasing the human being from existence, it is necessary to kill Taylor and Stajanov, Keynes and Lenin, the modern forms of production rather than the reproduction of one of the modes of being: us._cc781905- 5cde-3194-bb3b-136bad5cf58d_
The argument in favor of the preservation of different forms of life, including the human idea, is based on the following idea : the loss of a singular way of being in the whole of existence is a loss for the totality since it implies the disappearance of its power and, therefore, of the relationships and affectations that it could generate in other ways of being. That is why it is ontologically problematic, not ethically or teleologically, that any species should disappear. Although the change of the totality, and therefore, the disappearance of some modes will occur, this cannot be derived from a deliberate act of extermination, on the contrary, the volition must ensure that the modes with their unique characteristics are maintained, right? Is there enough complexity for an ape standing on a stone to be able to question its place, its complexity and its existence? Nietzsche was wrong aboutThe truth and the lie in the extramoral sense.Aren't tardigrades and other extremophiles just as complex? Isn't it the same with the photosensitive cells of cuttlefish? Just as it is an error, inherited from Judeo-Christian residues and their assumptions about human superiority in "creation", to start from anthropocentric perspectives to justify the importance of human life, it is also an error to deny it since the ontological argument applies to each mode of being; Attacking the ego of modernity is important, although the need to destroy us does not derive from it, because, despite the fact that we are not the center of existence, that does not take away from the magic of being so complex, unique andexisting.
Product of the above, it is clear that the modes of existence justify themselves by becoming they were created when they came into contact with the other ways of being, or in other words, when they evolved, particularities such as having claws or teeth were developed when entering into relationships with other aspects of existence such as food or the climate that matter as much development of being. That operates in the whole existence. Our teleological thought is a trifle compared to being. From this relational ontological perspective, the logical chain is not valued by virtue of its “axioms” (being is), but rather according to the complexity of its developments.
Now, it is clear that humans are doing something wrong. In my opinion, it is the modern productive systems (understood as capitalism and socialism in their varieties) that, despite their technical superiority, have caused the environmental debacle in which we find ourselves. In another text he wrote that we are in the paroxysm of "the alienation that modernity made of quality for quantity. The "philosophy of tons" that is in Stakhanovism and Taylorism; flowers of Europe that rest on the grave of Lenin". The desire to move the economy, to boost aggregate demand, to produce more than the other block or country, to increase the population and work and the product and consumption and power... has us on the brink of a mass extinction, which As its name indicates, it implies an enormous reduction of the modes of being. Obviously these systems are tied to anthropological, existential conceptions, particularist and analytical ontologies like those of liberalism, whose modification is a necessary condition to change the most immediate link in the chain that constitutes the social relations of production.
However, as I said, it is about modern production systems, not about human beings as such. Only in the last three centuries has this company played with the main gases that regulate the climate on the planet and led to the overexploitation of resources above the capacity of ecosystems to regenerate, but this is forgotten to be erased with an affirmation the fact that the human being has roamed the planet for a couple of million years without destroying it. Centuries instead of millions of years to "justify" the extermination of our species? It is a terrible mistake to fall into the easy answer to point fingers without addressing the complexity of changing production, demographics and levels of consumption and the existence of classes; it is easier to ask for the elimination of the culprit than to think about the complexity of the conditions in which the problem develops. That is why we must rethink and change the way we reproduce at all levels, on an animal scale, as a society, as part of existence; abandon the hedonistic desire and the modes of commodification of life (including the "ecocapitalisms"), and think about thereal need, as indicated by Raquel Gutiérrez and Huáscar Salazar Lohman inCommunity reproduction of life: thinking about social transformation in the present:
“Human beings need to satisfy material and immaterial needs and for that we produce social wealth –use values– at the same time that we are establishing a set of relationships to manage collective life: we manage to produce (among other things) and we produce to manage (among other things); and thus we reproduce ourselves as a species, as collectives and as individuals. Production is part of human reproduction, not vice versa. The management of social or political life are part of human reproduction, not vice versa. And production and management are social and therefore, taking the process of reproduction of existence as the starting point of the analysis, they are one; Social reproduction, really, is an indivisible process, even if it is damned and violently separated by modern thought, by the thought that arises when it is the production of capital that is placed at the center of the analysis.
June 25, 2022