A couple of weeks ago Australian novelist Tim Winton wrote a really provocative piece called Our leaders are collaborators with fossil fuel colonialists. This is the source of our communal dread, which I would strongly recommend.
I wrote a response called Winton, Fanon and what is to be done: On climate, capture, Cesaire…, which got some kind comments and retweets/shares from various friends and strangers. One was by Dr Dr Kieran Stevenson, who is a Naarm/Melbourne-based writer, musician, educator and researcher; “He makes music with the group Leonardo’s Robot. His work is focused on genre, politics and the notion of the pre-apocalyptic.”
I then sent him my recent page on why the “What is to be done?” question rarely gets properly asked, and even more rarely gets answered (people stay in loops of ‘what’s the correct emotional response/party line’). Two key insights there are from a brilliant and under-appreciated person (but then, she’s only a woman). Here’s both
I think the other side of so many of us just not getting it right is simply that it is so hard to get it right and so easy to feel that whatever we do it is not enough and is inadequate, hence some of the cheery optimism kicking in as defence…It’s very hard to create the necessary spaces to talk about our fragility, wherever it comes from and so many people retreat into false hope.
and
Something else that strikes me is that the last thirty – forty years have largely been a period of diminishing success and failure for the left. Some exceptions clearly but so many people are spending time struggling with failure or small returns for effort and that is something that it is very hard to deal with and so brings with it this culture of never being able to talk about defeat, disappointment, regret, sorrow and which leaves the optimistic register feeling empty of meaning….
Anyway, Dr Stevenson wrote a reply on bluesky, and has very kindly given me permission to post it here. I have added a few footnotes. Here it is.
I could be talking out of my arse, but something that keeps nagging at me is that on the left we keep reproducing individualist logic not just on the register of Individual Psychology but process as well (ie, innovation is something that springs out of actors rather than something that MUST emerge as a result of other historical forces). “What is to be done” makes sense for Lenin and co at that time because of kinetic energy stored in, eg, an abused and disaffected military, which can then be tipped.
Most of the old axes of organisation have been destabilised and the new ones are still emerging and I don’t reckon we’ll know what the new fulcrums are until we’re on top of them. Staying in the game, losing the idea of the ego as the site of salvation, not falling prey to leftist palace intrigue, and per your Winton piece learning from the site of suffering rather than of guilt. 1] I think the shift will feel too late but it’s inevitable.[2] In short I agree.
My *belief* is that if we’re ready when the stresses in the status quo get tectonic, then all of this feels-fruitless work will become socially and politically productive at a scale commensurate to the effort [3], and it’s important to sustain it to that end; it won’t emerge from finding the right “to be done”. But the power is so concentrated, and the mass of people so (understandably) invested in 20th century socioeconomic fictions [4], that it will probably feel apocalyptic when it comes. I stress about the huge amount of suffering and I hope that something better emerges sooner than I think it will, and in the meantime I plan to gnash my teeth, try not to die or deflate, try to be thoughtful and kind and considerate and attentive and not worry too much about hitting the KPIs of primarily-American online Socialism® or finding a way to be White, Western and in Charge (but good this time).
Other stuff I have written of late that may be of interest to people
- 11 theses on our impasse(s) with inkblots and memes
- How do we honour the soup-throwers?
- HAARPing on about the weather: of Hurricane Milton, climate, conspiracy, class and ‘what is to be done?’
- Seeing things that aren’t there (yet): “The promise and peril of sociotechnical visions of the future”
Footnotes
[1] I didn’t put it that eloquently, but I wish I had. Am totally ripping that off.
[2] Yep. See the Martin Luther King speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” that I am becoming a bit obsessed with:
We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood—it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, “Too late.” There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on.”
[3] There’s a deeply-affecting line or two in the late great Julian Rathbone’s novel Trajectories about this which I shall try to dig out
[4] Holy shit that is brilliantly put.
Update- a good friend sent me this on email…
Very good, especially the point about the long series of defeats for the left and for greens. So much culture-war-identity-politics stuff is just displacement activity, a kind of compensatory pseudo-power for the power ‘we’ never manage to win via elections and business.
The trouble with the hope of waiting for the hope lurking in the onset of exemplary disasters and turmoil is… that homo unsapiens is liable to embrace extreme archaic religion, conspiracies, scapegoating and warfare. Yes, we will tap into amazing reserves of local solidarity, as shown in disaster zones. But we will also, on present and past evidence, collapse mentally as well as ecologically and infrastructurally. Our epitaph is being drafted by the MAGA governor of Florida: “I’m not a global warming kinda guy.”
We press on. No point giving up.
marchudson.net 
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