Synthesis

On Jan 25, 2021, at 10:55 AM, Xin Wei Sha <Xinwei.Sha@asu.edu> wrote:

Friends from PSF and anti-)Social (anti-)Bodies groups,

Here’s a nice updated critique of "democracy at others’ expense" by Dennis Eversberg in Anthropological Theory 2021, informed by recent work on "property-based personhood and citizenship struggles in organized and flexible capitalism."

Of course, the “what is to be done” is much less well developed, but.  Here’s how the author ends:

…what alternative principles a non-appropriative, non- externalizing democracy could be built on, or what alternative, emancipatory principles of societalization we can imagine. Societalization—the establishment of insti- tutions and sets of rules that are different from community in assigning rights and obligations on a universal basis, regardless of concrete personal attributes—need not necessarily imply expansionism and externalization. Why shouldn’t egalitarian forms of societalization be possible that build on relations of care rather than exchange, improving the welfare and participatory opportunities of most people without having to expanding the rate of metabolic throughput? A truly universal and ecologically sustainable form of democratic societalization would need a conception of citizenship not defined by property, exchange and the inequalities and exclusions associated with them. And this requires challenging the hierarchical separation of the public and private that has been a defining feature of European democracy, which enables the abstract economic personhood of the public citizen proffered by private appropria- tion of others’ labour as property. It is that separation, and the systematic denial by abstract personhood of the ineluctably concrete acts of care and the gifts of nature that all humans depend on, that any genuinely egalitarian type of social organization would have to learn to do without.

Rather than trying to model non-hierarchical social relations on the symbolic counterpoints of joking and the carnivalesque, as Graeber himself (2007a) seems to suggest, it seems to me that struggles for substantial and sustained emancipation ought to be based on what constitutes both the real inversion and negated foundation of hierarchy: namely, efforts to constitute relations—both among humans and with extra-human nature—based on the principle of care and the consciousness of mutual dependency. By highlighting the great variability of how human societies have orga- nized these relations, and exposing the doxic anthropologies of capitalist modernity in their historical specificity, anthropological research offers valuable contributions to thinking about what future transformations of, or beyond, capitalism may await us, and about the possibilities and problems these transformations may hold for such ‘caring democratization’. A key part in this is of course challenging grandiose, grossly simplifying structural accounts like the one given here. Anthropologists, like sociol- ogists, are particularly well equipped for exposing the inconsistencies and ruptures in how the doxic anthropologies sketched out here play out in people’s actual socially specific experience (Eversberg, 2014b; Ortner, 2005; Skeggs, 2011). Understanding people’s multifarious ways of dealing and struggling with the pressures of exploita- tion and internalization as manifestations of non-identity points to paths toward human conditions liberated from the growth imperative that are already present as subordinate elements in human practice.

For envisioning possibilities of such transformations, the heterogeneous move- ments and actors of the ‘degrowth spectrum’ (Eversberg and Schmelzer, 2018) are obvious allies. Anthropologists’ insights resonate with their understanding that what is at stake is not further ‘liberation’ of the individual, but forms of autonomy built on different, relational and caring concepts of personhood (Eversberg and Schmelzer, 2017). Conversely, degrowth movements’ calls to engage in a pluriver- sal dialogue about ‘a world where many worlds fit’ (Kothari et al., 2019) and for a ‘decolonization of the imaginary’ (Latouche, 2005), as well as the manifold pre- figurative practices movement actors experiment with to explore the practical implications (Treu et al., 2020), are promising points of departure for inquiry into what democratic anthropologies of degrowth might look like, and what societal changes will be required to bring about conditions under which their generalization may become possible.

Calling for insights from vegetal life,

Xin Wei