March 3, 2020
Bernie and the Biotariat
“...the Cambridge academic and poet, Drew Milne, has crafted a riposte to this nation’s revered textual beginnings:
“We, the Biotariat, hold no human truths to be self-evident, acknowledging rather that all humans are mutually dependent on unacknowledged life forms, that they are endowed by their genealogy with certain heavy responsibilities, that among these are the Biosphere, the Solar Commune and the mutual furtherance of Peaceful Symbiosis. That to secure these responsibilities, alliances are assembled among humans, deriving their lasting vitality not just from human wills but from the continuance of all species. That whenever any form of Corporation becomes destructive of these ends, it is the duty of the people to alter or to liquidate it, and to institute new formations and alliances, laying its prospects on such principles and organizing its forms as to the best of their Scientific Understanding shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Sustainability, indeed, requires that Corporations long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that humans are more disposed to suffer, while Global Warming appears inevitable, than to take up arms against the forces to which they are accustomed. But when a long slick of Industrial Pollution and Technological Innovation, pursuing invariably the same Profit Motif, evinces a design to bring them unto species extinction, it is their responsibility, it is their duty, to throw off such Corporations, and to provide new regulative frameworks for future Symbiosis.”
Thus, the just cause for rebellion established by the Declaration of Independence leads Milne to argue, writing in the late eighteenth century literary style of the original document, that global warming and species extinction are now entirely valid causes for the overturning of the existing structures of power – which he identifies as ‘Corporations’. His is a ‘Declaration of Symbiotic Interdependence’, suggesting that whatever we may claim as our ‘independence’ is entirely mortgaged to the continued existence of other life forms.”
“First, some attributions and a definition. The Drew Milne piece, “The Makings of the Biotariat”, is quoted in Mckenzie Wark’s, Capital is Dead, 2019, and a footnote mentions that it is, “unpublished, quoted with permission.” The word ‘biotariat’ was coined by Stephen Collis, a Canadian poet who teaches at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C. It appears first in his poem, To the Barricades, 2013. In it, he writes, “The next revolution / is what culture will teach / we can and can’t do / as system’s feedback loop / grabbing the red flag / spore poppy claw / of the biotariat.” On a now defunct blog, he offers the following definition:
“The biotariat: that portion of existence that is enclosed as a “resource” by and for those who direct and benefit from the accumulation of wealth. So: workers and commoners; most animals and plants, including trees and forest and grassland ecosystems; water; land, as it provisions and enables biological life; minerals that lie beneath the surface of the land; common “wastes” and “sinks” too, into which the waste products of resource production and use are spilled—the atmosphere and the oceans. It’s that large. The enclosed and exploited life of this planet.”
READ MORE https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/03/03/bernie-and-the-biotariat/
Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? 2019