THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANTONIO NEGRI "RESISTANCE IN PRACTICE"

https://tinyurl.com/y8f77gop

Contents

Editors’ Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Real Movement and the Present State of Things
Timothy S. Murphy and Abdul-Karim Mustapha

Part I: The Long ’68 in Italy

1.Into the Factory: Negri’s Lenin and the Subjective Caesura (1968–73)7
Michael Hardt

 
2.Negri’s Proletarians and the State: A Critique 
Sergio Bologna

3.Feminism and Autonomy: Itinerary of Struggle 

Alisa Del Re

4.A Party of Autonomy?
Steve Wright

 
Part II: How to Resist the Present

5.The Refusal of Work as Demand and Perspective
Kathi Weeks

6.Cyber-Negri: General Intellect and Immaterial Labor
Nick Dyer-Witheford

 
7.Negri by Zapata: Constituent Power and theLimits of Autonomy
José Rabasa

8.‘Now Everything Must Be Reinvented’: Negri and Revolution
Kenneth Surin

The Refusal of Work:
From the Post emancipation Caribbean

to Post-Fordist Empire

Christopher Taylor

https://tinyurl.com/ycgprstt

The refusal of work and authority, or really the refusal of voluntary servitude, is the beginning of liberatory politics.—Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire

In 1880, the mixed-race Cuban Marxist Paul Lafargue published The Right to Be Lazy: Being a Refutation of the “Right to Work” of 1848

Lafargue’s witty and counterintuitive pamphlet argues that a “love” and “furious passion for work” has colonized revolutionary projects for liberation, leading revolutionaries to imagine “the worst sort of slavery” as the best kind of freedom.

Standing the “dogma of work” on its head, Lafargue asserts that freedom consists in expanding the time of nonwork, an expansion epitomized in the possibility of being lazy.

Although Lafargue’s radicalization of laziness had a precedent in Karl Marx’s own writing, and although Lafargue was himself Marx’s son-in-law, Lafargue’s “hedonist Marxism” failed to exert much influence on Lafargue’s father was the son of a Frenchman and a Haitian mulatto, Catalina Piron, who had sought refuge in Cuba during the Haitian Revolution. His maternal grandfather was a Jewish Frenchman, whose attempts to avoid the upheavals of revolution brought him from Haiti to France and from France to Jamaica. In Jamaica, he would have a daughter, Lafargue’s mother, with Maragarita Fripie, a Carib Indian. In his late teens Lafargue moved to Paris to study medicine, and he became involved with Lasallean and Proudhonist radicals and the burgeoning student movement of the time. Upon expulsion from medical school, Lafargue moved to London to continue his studies. There he met Karl Marx, whose daughter Laura he would marry. 

The twenty-first century already promises to be kinder to Lafargue’s memory. Recent theorists of antiwork Marxism have positioned the creole’s pamphlet as a “precursor” to the politics of refusal and fight popularized in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire and theorized more robustly in Negri’s work of the past three decades.

Yet—despite the history of racial slavery that Lafargue embodied, despite the centrality of the figure of slavery to Lafargue’s pamphlet, despite the pamphlet’s intervention into a discursive environment that spawned both “right to work” revolutionary discourses in Paris and plutocratic discourses in the post emancipation Antilles—Lafargue’s critique of work is never put in relation to his Caribbean genealogy.

The reduction of Lafargue’s creole roots to an accidental biographical datum indexes a broader marginalization of Caribbean histories of slavery and emancipation in genealogies of
antiwork Marxism. Consider the epigraph to this essay: Hardt and Negri’s qualification of “work and authority” as a relation of “voluntary servitude” effectively distinguishes their antiwork politics from historical refusals of in voluntary servitude, from refusals of slavery. This hesitation over slavery, I suggest, amounts to a symptom of disavowal, an attempt to exorcise the specter of a Caribbean past that haunts the structures of rule and refusal constitutive of post-Fordist Empire. Caribbean histories of slavery and emancipation constitute the political unconscious of anti-work Marxism. If, as Kathi Weeks suggest, antiwork politics is “both a practical demand and a theoretical perspective,” creoles have always served as both subject and object of this gaze.

In contrast to productivist Marxisms, which celebrates labor and the laborer, antiwork Marxism describes labor itself as the site and source of human bondage.

While attending to the various ways laborers refuse work—strikes, slowdowns, walkouts, theft, demands for a basic guaranteed income, and so on—antiwork Marxism also articulates a vision of “a potential mode of life that challenges the mode of life now dened by and subordinated to work.”

This essay explores how Caribbean histories speak in and through radical imaginings of postwork forms of life. In the narrative that I offer, the Caribbean serves a crucial locale—a kind of “laboratory,” to borrow Hardt’s description of Italy—in which the epistemologies and practices of antiwork Marxism were first elaborated.

Yet the spatial and temporal scales adopted by antiwork theory typically elide the formative influence of Caribbean history: antiwork Marxism typically codes itself as a politics for, and the product of, the post-Fordist global North.

SEE

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2007/02/black-history-month-paul-lafargue.html

Castor & Pollux? The Marx - Engels Relationship

Jamie Pitman

54 Pages

1 File ▾

[Research Question]
What is the nature of the Marx - Engels relationship, and its consequences for the subsequent development of Marxist theory?

[Abstract]
The thesis presented here is that Engels was unable to follow the change
in Marx’s thinking, which the latter affected during the 1850s. I argue that Engels ’theorisation is impoverished in relation to Marx’s; but that a simple separation between
the two thinkers remains difficult because their union has been consecrated by many, including otherwise critical Marxists. In my concluding argument, I consider the implications of this for contemporary Marxism, and to what extent the problems may be overcome.

https://www.academia.edu/5013016/Castor_and_Pollux_The_Marx_Engels_Relationship

Marx on nothingness in Buddhism

Pradip Baksi

Abstract:
Marx had made two near identical statements on the concept of nothingness

(Sanskrit:Śūnyatā;Pali:Suññatā; Vietnamese:Không) in some forms of Buddhism in two of his letters written on 18and 20 March 1866. He wrote those letters while suffering from

hidradenitis suppurativa and residing as a medical tourist in Margate, England. He arrived at his understanding of nothingness in Buddhism from the following books of his intimate friend

 Carl (Karl) Friedrich Koeppen(Köppen) (1808-1863):
Die Religion des Buddha, 2 Bde. Erster Band.
Die Religion des Buddhaund ihre Entstehung, 1857. Zweiter Band.
Die lamaische Hierarchie und Kirche, 1859; Berlin:Ferdinand Schneider.

 Marx’s personal copies of these books appear to be lost; they are not yet
indicated in the reconstructed catalog :MEGA 2 IV/32. 

The above indicated statements of Marx may be treated as the ground zero for future investigations on the interrelationships of Marxism's and Buddhism's. Many currents of Buddhism and Marxism have converged in Vietnam over many years from many directions. That has created some unique opportunities for the future emergence of scientific investigation on the teachings of Siddhartha Gautam Buddha and those of Karl Marx from within the contemporary societies there.

https://www.academia.edu/60278029/Marx_on_nothingness_in_Buddhism

Engels, Dialectics and Buddhism

Ramkrishna Bhattacharya

The paper explores the sources from which Frederick Engels might have got his idea of the Buddhists of India being adepts in dialectics.

The book that has come down to us under the title Dialectics of Nature
is strictly speaking not a book but an edited version of four folders containing miscellaneous notes and jottings left unfinished by their author, Frederick Engels. The material was never published in Engels’s life time although parts of it were published in 1896 and1898 posthumously. The full text of the manuscripts was first published in the then USSR in 1925 alongside a Russian translation. Later editions and translations mostly follow the text and the arrangements of the folders made in the 1941 Russian edition. Neither Marx nor Lenin had seen the drafts that Engels had been preparing for along time. Yet Dialectics of Nature is Engels’s most significant contribution to the extension of the area of dialectics to the natural sciences.

Marx had encouraged Engels to take up this work in right earnest and Engels felt it incumbent upon him to establish dialectics in the domain of nature as in the world of man. In spite of many errors and shortcomings in the work, nuggets of wisdom as well as pregnant hypotheses make the work more valuable as a quarry of ideas rather than a finished formulation to be treated as the outcome of detailed research and analysis. Everything was in the draft stage. Engels certainly would not have published the draft without drastic revision. That there are glaring errors in the drafts has been pointed out by the Marxists themselves. 

J.B.S. Haldane, for instance, in his Preface to the first English translation of
Dialectics of Nature (1940/1946), noted: ‘In the essay on “Tidal Friction,” Engels made a serious mistake, or more accurately a mistake which would have been serious had he published it. But I very much doubt whether he would have done so. … I have little doubt that either he or one of his scientific friends such as Schorlemmer would have detected the mistake in the essay on “Tidal friction.” But even as a mistake it is interesting, because it is one of the mistakes which lead to a correct result…. Such mistakes have been extremely fruitful in the history of science

Elsewhere there are statements which are certainly untrue, for example, in the sections on stars and Protozoa. But here Engels cannot be blamed for following some of the best astronomers and zoologists of his day. The technical improvement of the telescope and microscope has of course led to great increases in our knowledge here in the last sixty years’ (xi).In spite of all this, Haldane frankly admitted: ‘Had his (sc. Engels’s) remarks on Darwinism been generally known, I for one would have been saved a certain amount of muddled thinking’ (xiv). Hence, what Sebastiano Timpanaro said about Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-criticism – ‘the value of which is no way affected by the ten or fifty errors in physics which can be found in it’ (42) – also applies to Dialectics of Nature

.https://www.academia.edu/12569254/Engels_Dialectics_and_Buddhism

A proposal for further extending Karl Marx's critique of political economy

Pradip Baksi

2022, 
50 Pages
1 File ▾
This is an updated version of a proposal for further extending Karl Marx's critique of political economy.

https://tinyurl.com/yb8bf9gx

A proposal for further extending Karl Marx’s critique of political economy

Pradip Baksi

孔子
Confucius said:
There was one who did not have to do much
[無為 wúwéi] when ruling and he was Shun!

All he did was to sit courteously facing south!
―
孔子
Confucius,

論語
Lúnyǔ
[Edited Conversations Analects] 15.4 [insome versions 15. 5].

Σωκράτης

Socrates said:

[In] all states there is the same principle of justice, which is the interest of the government; and as the government must be supposed to have power, the only reasonable conclusion is, that everywhere there is one principle of justice, 

which is the interest of the stronger
Πλάτων
Plato,
πολιτεία
Politeia
De Republica / Republic
], I.339.

कौटयः
Kauṭilya wrote:
The sources of human livelihood are termed artha, wealth; the earth whichcontains the human beings and the resources for their sustenance is alsocalled artha, wealth. The discipline which deals with the means of acquiring and protecting that earth is the Arthaśāstra, the Science of Polity.
―
कौटयः
/Kauṭilya,
अथशाम ्
Arthaśāstra, Book XV, Chapter I.1-2.

Karl Marx wrote:
I examine the system of bourgeois economy in the following order: capital,landed property, wage-labour; the state, foreign trade, world market.
―
Karl Marx (1818-1883),
Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, Erstes Heft
[On the Critique of Political Economy, First Booklet](1859):Vorwort [Foreword], first sentence.

ANARCHISM, MARXISM, AND THE IDEOLOGICAL COMPOSITION OF THE CHICAGO IDEA

Saku Pinta

The aim of this article is to reexamine the ideological composition of the “Chicago Idea” movement of the Haymarket Martyrs. Following the “morphological” approach of Michael Freeden, I will argue that the evolution of the revolutionary labor movement in Chicago 1876–1886 exhibits conceptual features common to both the Marxist and anarchist traditions—which deeply impacted its radical praxis and outlook—in what might be regarded as an early “libertarian communist” formulation. The intellectual trajectory of the Chicago Idea will be contextualized with reference to key developments in the international and American socialist milieu, showing both similarities and differences with its state socialist, insurrectionary, and individualist contemporaries. The Chicago Idea remains an important ideological configuration, especially inlight of more recent efforts to forge a common ground between social anarchism's and revolutionary Marxism's. Viewed in this light, an analysis of what Grubacic and Lynd have recently called the “Haymarket Synthesis” and its legacy shows that an anarchist/Marxist synthesis has deeper historical roots than most left historians have previously acknowledged and might provide one point of departure on which to reconceptualise a contemporary anarchist/Marxist synthesis. 

https://tinyurl.com/yaydsb6y

The Spanish Civil War

James Michael Yeoman

2018, The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism

20 Pages

1 File ▾

This chapter provides a broad introduction to the subject of anarchism in Spain and the Spanish Civil War, noting the key developments, historiography and debates in this area.                 

https://tinyurl.com/yaejdnwn

Contesting Barcelona’s Soul between Two Flags : Conceptual Frontiers of the Turn-of-century Catalonia between Catalan Nationalism and Anarcho-Syndicalism

Seonghek Kang

22 Pages

1 File ▾   https://tinyurl.com/ybhorvss

   

Tom Arms’ World Review: Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Justice at home and abroad, Sri Lanka

By Tom Arms | Sun 16th January 2022 - 

Ukraine

After a week of Ukrainian talks the question is whether Vladimir Putin is using negotiations to avoid war or create a pretext to start one. The communiques emerging from Geneva, Brussels and Vienna shed little light on the subject. They are peppered with insubstantial diplomatese phrases such as “frank,” “friendly” and “constructive.” Off the record, journalists are being told that chief US negotiator Wendy Sherman is offering to widen the talks with suggested discussions on missile deployments and other issues. The US is clearly trying to drag out talks in the hopes that protracted jaw, jaw will lead to reduced tensions. But on one issue the Americans and their NATO allies appear to be standing firm: They will not agree to a legally binding commitment to block Ukraine (and Georgia) from NATO membership. Putin has made it clear that Ukrainian enrolment in NATO is unacceptable. In fact, Putin has compared it to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The Russian leader has also denounced America’s strategic arms policies, blaming them from withdrawing from the ABM Treaty (true), INF (not true) and the Open Skies Agreement (not true). However, Putin is also adamant that he will not be bogged down in the “swamp” of protracted negotiations. His concern over lengthy talks is at least partly related to the fact that if he doesn’t move soon Russian tanks will become mired in the mud of a Ukrainian spring. If Putin does invade, Biden has threatened sanctions “like none he has ever seen.” These are likely to include locking Russia out of the international banking system and blocking the Nordstream2 gas pipeline.

Kazakhstan

It now appears that the uprising in Kazakhstan was more of an internal power struggle than a popular uprising. In the wake of the violence the head of, Kazakhstan’s security services, Karim Masimov, has been sacked and charged with treason. In addition, 81-year-old former president Nursultan Nazarbayev has been removed from the chairmanship of the nation’s powerful Security Council and his family has dropped from public view. Nazabaryev, who was an autocratic president for 25 years, hand-picked Kassim-Zhomart Tokayev as his successor. It had been assumed that the ex-president was still pulling the puppet strings and grooming his daughter for the presidency. Now it seems that the puppet has cut the strings and turned on his master. He also appears to have the blessing of Russia’s Vladimir Putin who still holds considerable sway in the former Soviet republic. Twenty-five percent of Kazakhstan’s 18 million citizens are ethnic Russian. Its gas pipelines all run to Russia, and 2,000 Russian troops were called in by Tokayev to protect Russian assets when the revolt started. After killing 164 protesters, arresting 10,000 and possibly neutering the Nazarbayev family and their supporters, Tokayev appears to be firmly back in control and the Russian troops are back in their barracks.

War criminals face justice

It is reassuring to note that the blindfold over the eyes of Lady Justice (aka Justitia) appears to remain in place in at least some countries. Britain, Germany, Australia and America (acting with the UK) have this week shown that the greatest in the land are subject to the same laws as everyone else no matter how high they climb the greasy pole of ambition. In the case of the Germans it was a matter of “you can run but you can’t hide.” This week a Koblenz court sentenced former Syrian Colonel Anwar Raslan to life imprisonment for supervising the torture of more than 4,000 prisoners in war-torn Syria. He was found guilty of crimes against humanity under the UN’s Universal Jurisdiction rules. This coming week a Syrian doctor also appears before a German court. Austria, Norway, Sweden and France have also taken legal steps against former members of the Syrian regime who have sought refuge in their countries.

Djokovic, Downing Street Parties and Prince Andrew

Australia has proven that rules apply to tennis players off the court as well as on. The country’s immigration minister, Alex Hawke, has overturned a court decision and ordered the deportation of the world’s number one tennis player—Novak Djokovic—who doubles as a prominent anti-vaxxer. Unfortunately for Djokovic, Australia has some of the world’s toughest rules on covid vaccinations and entry into the country. In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson appears to be heading for the exit door at 10 Downing Street as journalists line up to reveal a succession of Downing Street parties held during covid lockdowns that he ordered. The latest was the day before the funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh when the country was in national mourning. Boris has made what he calls a “heartfelt” apology but the press and many of his colleagues think it was half-hearted. Finally the highest in the land (almost) has also been subjected to the rules. Prince Andrew, ninth in succession to the British throne, has been stripped of his titles and military ranks. He will now appear as a private citizen in a US civil court where he will be accused of sexually abusing Ms Victoria Giuffre in 2001. A delighted Ms Giuffre said: “My goal has always been to show that the rich and famous are not above the law.”

Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka is in deep financial trouble. This creates problems for China, India, Japan, Russia, the US and several other countries. Sri Lanka’s problems started with the refusal of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to accept IMF conditions for a restructuring of the island nation’s debts. In desperate need of cash, the Sri Lankan president turned to China for replacement help. Since then a combination of the pandemic, poor investment decisions and a drop in tourism has worsened Sri Lanka’s economic situation. Its foreign currency reserves have dwindled to almost nil. Inflation is 12 percent. A $500m debt repayment is due on Tuesday (18 Jan). Another $5.4 billion has to be repaid by the end of the year. Enter China which is Sri Lanka’s fourth biggest creditor after Japan, the IMF and Asian Development Bank. Sri Lanka has asked Beijing to restructure its loans. It is not the first time that the Sri Lankans have gone cap in hand to the Chinese. In 2017 they swapped a proportion of their equity in the Sri Lankan port of Hambantota in a debt restructuring deal. The Chinese now own 70 percent of the equity in the port on the south eastern tip of Sri Lanka. The move set alarm bells ringing in Tokyo, Washington, Canberra and Delhi where it was feared that the Chinese might use their equity position to place naval forces in the Indian Ocean. The “Quad” started eyeing the facilities at Trincomalee, the region’s largest deep-water facility. So far, however, the Chinese have kept their presence in Sri Lanka on a strict commercial footing. But they will want something in return for helping the Sri Lankans out of their current financial mess. What that may be is what is causing sleepless nights elsewhere.

* Tom Arms is the Foreign Editor of Liberal Democratic Voice. His book “America Made in Britain” has recently been published by Amberley Books. He is also the author of “The Encyclopaedia of the Cold War.”

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Corporate sedition is more damaging to America than the Capitol attack

Robert Reich

Kyrsten Sinema receives millions from business and opposes progressive priorities. Republicans who voted to overturn an election still bag big bucks. Whose side are CEOs on?

Senator Kyrsten Sinema boards an elevator at the US Capitol.

 Photograph: Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters

Sun 16 Jan 2022 06.00 GMT

Capitalism and democracy are compatible only if democracy is in the driver’s seat.

That’s why I took some comfort just after the attack on the Capitol when many big corporations solemnly pledged they’d no longer finance the campaigns of the 147 lawmakers who voted to overturn election results.ey were over the moment the public stopped paying attention.

A report published last week by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington shows that over the past year, 717 companies and industry groups have donated more than $18m to 143 of those seditious lawmakers. Businesses that pledged to stop or pause their donations have given nearly $2.4m directly to their campaigns or political action committees (Pacs).

But there’s a deeper issue here. The whole question of whether corporations do or don’t bankroll the seditionist caucus is a distraction from a much larger problem.
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The tsunami of money now flowing from corporations into the swamp of American politics is larger than ever. And this money – bankrolling almost all politicians and financing attacks on their opponents – is undermining American democracy as much as did the 147 seditionist members of Congress. Maybe more.

The Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema – whose vocal opposition to any change in the filibuster is on the verge of dooming voting rights – received almost $2m in campaign donations in 2021 even though she is not up for re-election until 2024. Most of it came from corporate donors outside Arizona, some of which have a history of donating largely to Republicans.

Has the money influenced Sinema? You decide. Besides sandbagging voting rights, she voted down the $15 minimum wage increase, opposed tax increases on corporations and the wealthy and stalled on drug price reform – policies supported by a majority of Democratic senators as well as a majority of Arizonans.

Over the last four decades, corporate Pac spending on congressional elections has more than quadrupled, even adjusting for inflation.

Labor unions no longer provide a counterweight. Forty years ago, union Pacs contributed about as much as corporate Pacs. Now, corporations are outspending labor by more than three to one.

According to a landmark study published in 2014 by the Princeton professor Martin Gilens and Northwestern professor Benjamin Page, the preferences of the typical American have no influence at all on legislation emerging from Congress.

Gilens and Page analyzed 1,799 policy issues in detail, determining the relative influence of economic elites, business groups, mass-based interest groups and average citizens. Their conclusion: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” Lawmakers mainly listen to the policy demands of big business and wealthy individuals – those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns and promote their views.

It’s probably far worse now. Gilens and Page’s data came from the period 1981 to 2002: before the supreme court opened the floodgates to big money in the Citizens United case, before Super Pacs, before “dark money” and before the Wall Street bailout.

The corporate return on this mountain of money has been significant. Over the last 40 years, corporate tax rates have plunged. Regulatory protections for consumers, workers and the environment have been defanged. Antitrust has become so ineffectual that many big corporations face little or no competition.

Corporations have fought off safety nets and public investments that are common in other advanced nations (most recently, Build Back Better). They’ve attacked labor laws, reducing the portion of private-sector workers belonging to a union from a third 40 years ago to just over 6% now.

They’ve collected hundreds of billions in federal subsidies, bailouts, loan guarantees and sole-source contracts. Corporate welfare for big pharma, big oil, big tech, big ag, the largest military contractors and biggest banks now dwarfs the amount of welfare for people.

The profits of big corporations just reached a 70-year high, even during a pandemic. The ratio of CEO pay in large companies to average workers has ballooned from 20-to-1 in the 1960s, to 320-to-1 now.

Meanwhile, most Americans are going nowhere. The typical worker’s wage is only a bit higher today than it was 40 years ago, when adjusted for inflation.

But the biggest casualty is public trust in democracy.

In 1964, just 29% of voters believed government was “run by a few big interests looking out for themselves”. By 2013, 79% of Americans believed it.

Corporate donations to seditious lawmakers are nothing compared with this 40-year record of corporate sedition.

Campaigners target senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, near the US Capitol. Photograph: Ken Cedeno/REX/Shutterstock

A large portion of the American public has become so frustrated and cynical about democracy they are willing to believe blatant lies of a self-described strongman, and willing to support a political party that no longer believes in democracy.

As I said at the outset, capitalism is compatible with democracy only if democracy is in the driver’s seat. But the absence of democracy doesn’t strengthen capitalism. It fuels despotism.



Despotism is bad for capitalism. Despots don’t respect property rights. They don’t honor the rule of law. They are arbitrary and unpredictable. All of this harms the owners of capital. Despotism also invites civil strife and conflict, which destabilize a society and an economy.

My message to every CEO in America: you need democracy, but you’re actively undermining it.

It’s time for you to join the pro-democracy movement. Get solidly behind voting rights. Actively lobby for the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

Use your lopsidedly large power in American democracy to protect American democracy – and do it soon. Otherwise, we may lose what’s left of it.

The true meaning of 6 January: we must answer Trump’s neofascism with hope
Robert Reich

The US supreme court to Americans: tough luck if you get Covid at work
Robert Reich

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com

Book Review: Cities in the Anthropocene: New Ecology and Urban Politics by Ihnji Jon


Bouchra Tafrata
January 16th, 2022

In Cities in the Anthropocene: New Ecology and Urban Politics, Ihnji Jon explores how researchers, city planners and the public can develop a bottom-up approach to environmentalism in urban areas, focusing on the cities of Cape Town, Cleveland, Darwin and Tulsa. This book contributes to establishing a new approach to urban research that understands cities as complex environments and stresses the importance of collaboration with communities, finds Bouchra Tafrata.

Cities in the Anthropocene: New Ecology and Urban Politics. Ihnji Jon. Pluto Press. 2021.

Find this book (affiliate link):

In her article ‘The City We Want: Against the Banality of Urban Planning Research’, Ihnji Jon reflects on the current state of academia and how a space of intellectual exercise is being threatened by marketisation, the fear of remaining invisible without publications, h-indexes and an obsession with producing ‘objective’ knowledge. As a young scholar trying to carve a pathway in urban studies, I ruminate on how the current knowledge produced within universities is affecting approached communities. Whose voices are we listening to? Why are institutions and academics trying to maintain the barrier they have constructed between research and activism? If cities are complex, why is academia generating ‘banal’ research? In this regard, Jon evokes Robert W. Lake’s words, calling for a shift ‘from a stance of distanced objectivity to an engaged attitude of solidarity and empathy’ (72).

The current climate situation and the continuous debate between governments and policymakers about the deteriorating state of the planet, in addition to the differences in public opinion, push us to question governments’ approaches to climate issues and to ask why many have failed at implementing climate-related policies. Jon’s book Cities in the Anthropocene is a call for researchers, city planners and the public to reflect on the benefits of a bottom-up approach in environmentalism and to incentivise the public to evaluate its local position within an interdependent global system.

Jon’s scholarship focuses on analysing a ‘new ecology’ that advocates for anti-essentialist environmentalism theory and speaks against political discourse that commands the public to foster a coercive relationship between humans and nature. In her words, ‘‘‘new ecology’’ tried to go beyond the kinds of environmentalism that rely on the fetishised understanding of ‘‘nature’’ or ‘‘the environment’’ that unnecessarily creates the boundaries between our everyday living (human needs) and ecosystem functions (ecological needs)’ (3).

The book starts by addressing the politics of scale and how cities can act as frontiers for climate change mitigation. The notion of ‘scale’ remains contested, especially in environmental governance. The interconnected planetary ecosystem continues to shed light on the limits of tackling climate issues on a national scale, as these issues expand beyond political delimitations.

In addition, turning environmental issues into ‘leftist debates’ impedes climate change mitigation and conceals the sources of these issues. The ideological turn of the climate debate must be dismantled, as it is a global issue that incessantly deteriorates our daily lives that rely on the state of the environment. As Jon articulates, ‘proposing a positive reconfiguration of scale is needed more than ever, especially for the environmental issues that are intrinsically both local and global’ (32).

Jon illustrates the implications of embedding nature and climate change mitigation in planning without making it a case of leftist political engagement through two cities: Darwin, Australia, and Tulsa, USA. The urban policies and strategies deployed in these cities are intended to attract different communities whose political positions do not align. This is a phenomenon that Jon refers to as ‘pragmatic environmentalism’ (34).

Climate-related disasters, notably hazardous weather, have been affecting urban citizens’ lives in Tulsa. The city’s history of flooding has contributed to centring nature in design, which has led to the creation of ‘pragmatic environmentalism’ strategies: for instance, stormwater management systems as well as embedding greenery, walkability and the ‘Instagram-able’ in urban space to attract Millenials, professionals and families.

In the case of Darwin, its tropical climate and weather hazards have encouraged the implementation of different projects that foster what the author refers to as ‘secularising nature’ (38). This pragmatic approach to nature strengthens proximity between urban citizens and the weather hazards that affect their cities. It asks us to reflect on how we can implement pro-nature practices without idealising ‘nature’.

Through contrasting Bruno Latour’s attention to ‘negative feelings that are generated by the individuals’ (40) with Spinozian ethics on how doing good makes us feel good (41), Jon highlights the importance of practices that foster care, instead of feelings of obligation and authority. In fact, pro-environment city-scale projects – such as embedding greenery in the streets, minimising parking areas, low-impact development (LID) initiatives (namely on-site stormwater treatment centres), green energy transition and establishing attractive amenities in different neighbourhoods – can shift the narrative on climate issues. They also invite different communities to participate in the pro-nature ethos, as our quality of life relies on the state of the ecosystem. Jon linked these initiatives to Deweyan philosophy which shows how valuing the public’s experiences can serve to build bridges with the ordinary, instead of only relying on theories and ideologies (71). This approach centres the everyday experiences of people and establishes engagement with different communities.

Another timely topic the author tackles is how we can address climate change, environmental sustainability and urban inequalities through the same prism, without marginalising communities who endure socio-spatial disparities. Jon studies this issue in two different cities: Cleveland, USA, and Cape Town, South Africa. These two cities endure poverty and socio-spatial segregation. Cleveland is one of the rust belt cities that bore the aftermaths of the 2008 financial crash and industrial decline, which engendered housing inequalities and socio-economic instability (77, 86). Cape Town’s apartheid history and policies created a spatial divide between white settlers and non-white citizens and pushed the latter to dwell in informal settlements, without access to clean water, sanitation, energy or socio-economic opportunities (94, 97,102).

Jon highlights the role of environmental justice theory, which studies how a green policy agenda can reinforce socio-economic inequalities (81). Environmentalist institutions and climate change social movements, particularly in the West, demonstrate how whiteness continues to dominate these spaces and how environmentalists and activists should question whose climate justice they are advocating for. Socio-economic precarity and urban segregation are colonial and the history of white supremacy is still visible in post-colonies. Recognising this offers a chance to re-imagine inclusive and equitable development policies.

The last chapter of the book explores how social complexity theory can inspire environmental action. Referring to the work of Manuel DeLanda on the materiality of cities and connecting this to Deleuzian assemblage theory, Jon explains the role of interaction between different individuals, how this generates a group identity and how this affects the members of the group. In Jon’s words: ‘placing interaction effects at the heart of understanding social entities may relieve us from the ontological contradiction between “having a group identity (which is the soul of the whole)” versus “respecting/acknowledging individual agency and heterogeneity”’ (114). Additional elements vital to recognising the complexity of social entities are understanding the history of the interactions that have occurred between individuals and establishing practices that accommodate heterogeneity (116, 117, 119). Planning with/within complexity can push decision-makers to consider the varieties of social entities and to practise inclusion.

Jon asks how cities can ‘inject their pro-environmentalist ideas via an abstract machine, using the powers of imagination, narratives, expressions, or poetic devices that can inspire people rather than forcing them to pursue environmentalism’ (135). Jon draws on various examples that illustrate how creative projects are working to shift dominant narratives, including the New York Times’s ‘Modern Love’ series that depicts the multiple forms of ‘love’. Through these, Jon calls for a shift in planning and narrative in urban studies (143) through the embrace of the ‘habit of tolerance’ (158) and the complexity of narratives in cities.

While I continue to reflect on practices of inclusion and exclusion inside and outside of institutional walls, Jon’s book helps in setting the mood for establishing a new approach to urban research. It connects the philosophy of pragmatism, climate change mitigation and city planning. It defines cities as complex environments where inequalities are reinforced through systemic marginalisation, and where local/global governments can advocate for pro-environmentalism through a bottom-up approach. It encourages us, researchers and practitioners, to examine the utility of theories produced in the academy, collaborate with communities and be attentive to their narratives and needs.

Note: This article first appeared at our sister site, LSE Review of Books. It gives the views of the author, not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy or the London School of Economics. Featured image credit: Lucas Alexander on Unsplash


About the author

Bouchra Tafrata is a Researcher and host of In Praise of the Margin Podcast. She completed a Master’s in Public Policy at the Willy Brandt School at the University of Erfurt. Her research dissects international political economy, socio-spatial inequalities and urban governance.