#red plenty

[probablyasocialecologist]

Marx had drawn a nightmare picture of what happened to human life under capitalism, when everything was produced only in order to be exchanged; when true qualities and uses dropped away, and the human power of making and doing itself became only an object to be traded. Then the makers and the things made turned alike into commodities, and the motion of society turned into a kind of zombie dance, a grim cavorting whirl in which objects and people blurred together till the objects were half alive and the people were half dead. Stock-market prices acted back upon the world as if they were independent powers, requiring factories to be opened or closed, real human beings to work or rest, hurry or dawdle; and they, having given the transfusion that made the stock prices come alive, felt their flesh go cold and impersonal on them, mere mechanisms for chunking out the man-hours. Living money and dying humans, metal as tender as skin and skin as hard as metal, taking hands, and dancing round, and round, and round, with no way ever of stopping; the quickened and the deadened, whirling on.

Francis Spufford, Red Plenty

[queenlua]

this passage where the Soviet writer Sasha ponders the intersection of censorship and his work is... oof.  emphases mine

It had been exciting, four or five years ago, to feel the space expand that a writer was allowed to work in.  What could be said ballooned, not because it had become permissible to disagree about anything fundamental, but because suddenly it seemed that a huge area of human nature existed which could be explored without needing to jostle the orthodoxies.  Possibility made Soviet literature dizzy for a while.  You could write confused sons rather than authoritative fathers, disappointment rather than just contrasting shades of rapture, lyrical intimacy instead of monotonous epic.  For a while, he scarcely cared about the limits of this new freedom, they were drawn so much further out than they had been, they pressed so much more lightly.  But soon he found he had reached them all the same.  The mere logic of devising characters more freely got him there.  Why must the confusion of the sons always be dissolved away, at the end of the piece, into a goodwill felt by no person in particular, yet, somehow, all in general?  Why, in a piece of work for grownups, must disappointment always be assuaged?  Why must lyric defend nothing larger than the integrity of friendships round the kitchen table?  If anything, the frustration was worse now than it had been before.  He had not known what he was missing until he was arbitrarily allowed a fraction of it; that was part of it.  And another part was that the reason for limits had departed.  It had been acknowledged now, once for all, that life was not just the forward surge of a crowd, everyone singing and shouting, everyone moving with that tumbling impetuousness that in Soviet film made even showing up at the factory gate look like a spontaneous march on the Winter Palace.  It had been admitted that other moods, other tones of voice, existed and were necessary.  And with that, the rapture was gone.

[bookcoversonly]

Title: Red Plenty | Author: Francis Spufford | Publisher: Faber and Faber (2010)

[starsinmypocketpussy]

The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson: some quotes

‘It’s funny how England never seemed to pay too much of a price for its crimes.” “No one does. You pay for being the victim, not the criminal.”’ (p 32)

‘If one percent of the humans alive controlled everyone’s work, and took far more than their share of the benefits of that work, while also blocking the project of equality and sustainability however they could, that project would become more difficult. This would go without saying, except that it needs saying.‘ (p 58)

‘The three richest people in the world possess more financial assets than all the people in the forty-eight poorest countries added together.‘ (p 74)

‘This is what our thinking has been reduced to: essentially a neoliberal analysis and judgment of the neoliberal situation. It’s the structure of feeling in our time; we can’t think in anything but economic terms, our ethics must be quantified and rated for the effects that our actions have on GDP.‘ (p 74)

‘Arctic permafrost contained as much stored methane as all the Earth’s cattle would create and emit over six centuries, and this giant burp, if released, would almost certainly push Earth over an irreversible tipping point into jungle planet mode, completely ice-free; at which point sea level would be 110 meters higher than at present, with global average temperatures at least 5 or 6 degrees Celsius higher and probably more, rendering great stretches of the Earth uninhabitable by humans. At that point civilization would be over. Some remainder of humanity might adapt to the new biosphere, but they would be a post-traumatic remnant, in a post-mass-extinction world. That being the case, efforts were being made to thicken the Arctic sea ice in winter, which would allow it to hold on longer through the summers.’ (p 147) ‘If economics is a method for optimizing various objective functions subject to constraints, then the focus of change would need to look again at those “objective functions.” Not profit, but biosphere health, should be the function solved for; and this would change many things.‘ (p 166)

‘Everything relied on the whole system working. If it didn’t we would die, one way or the other, from thirst or from fighting each other. This was all completely clear to everyone but the crazies among us. There are always such people, but in this case they were outnumbered a hundred to one at least, and subdued by the police if they made trouble. For the rest of us, it came down to this: we had to trust our society to work well enough to save us. As it had never worked very well before, this was a big leap of faith, for sure.‘ (p 168)

‘We were so afraid that we behaved well, that was how bad it was.‘ (p 169)

‘Extinctions and ocean warming can’t be fixed no matter how much money future people have, so economics as practiced misses a fundamental aspect of reality.‘ (p 173)

‘Another man said I don’t own my kids’ teacher, I don’t own my doctor, I don’t need to own my house. I just want to pay the collective for it, not some landlord. So maybe someday the solidarity will overcome the splitting.‘ (p 248)

‘We have to live, we have to give this place to the kids with the animals still alive and a chance to make a living. That’s not so much to ask.‘ (p 248)

‘Some who feel the end is near work to hasten it, or worsen it. Their position seems to be that if they’re going to die then the world must die with them. This is clearly a manifestation of narcissism, and has been named the Götterdämmerung Syndrome.‘ (p 297)

‘Who is incentivized to do what in a wage ratio of one to a thousand? Those getting a thousand times more than starting wage earners, what’s their incentive from out of that situation? To hide, I’d say. To hide the fact that they don’t actually do a thousand times more than their employees. Hiding like that, they won’t be normal. They’ll be bullshitters.‘ (p 384)

‘Not that there aren’t conspiracies, it’s just that they’re all well known.‘ (p 408)

‘We turned wolves into dogs and they turned us into humans.’ (p 539)

[cocainesocialist]

Real wealth is the collective capacity to produce, care and enjoy. This is Red Plenty. We, and they, have had it wrong for a while: it is not that we are anti-capitalist, it's that capitalism, with all its visored cops, its teargas, all the theological niceties of its economics, is set up to block Red Plenty. The attack on capital has to be fundamentally based on the simple insight that, far from being about “wealth creation”, capital necessarily and always blocks our access to this common wealth. Everything for everyone. All of us first.

Mark Fisher - Abandon hope (summer is coming)

[st-just]

True, reason was a difficult tool. You laboured with it to see a little more, and at best you got glimpses, partial truths: but the glimpses were always worth having. True, the new consciously driven world still had rough edges and very obvious imperfections, but those things would change. This was only the beginning, the day after Reason's reign began.

Leonid Vitalevich

[probablyasocialecologist]

Once you had seen it, once you had parted the curtains of the visible world and seen that human beings were only temporary expressions of ancient information, dimly seen in tiny glimpses by the light of science’s deductive flashlight, but glimpsed enough to tell that it was vast, and intricate, and slowly changing by indifferent rules of its own as it went on its way into a far future – then all the laws and plans of the self-important present looked like momentary tics and jitters in comparison. A dark message, posted from the past to the future; a dark armada, floating through time. Dark masses, moving in the dark. Dark water. Dark ocean swell.

Francis Spufford, Red Plenty

[queenlua]

“And what is your field?” asked Valentin politely.

“Mutagenesis,” she said.  It was one of her rules that she would always name her research honestly, when asked about it.  But it was up to the hearer what they were able to make of it.  She saw no obligation to make life easy for the world’s legion of fools.