Socialist Survivalism

“Living in a World That Can’t Be Fixed – Reimagining Counterculture Today,” by Curtis White, 2020

According to White, there are 3 choices for those who understand the present capitalist world is slowly falling apart.  The first is ‘reform’ of the rigid capitalist system, which White sees as impossible at this point.  The second is ‘revolution’ which White sees as bloody and unlikely due to the shredded nature of the working class.  The third is ‘socialist survivialism’ – building a bit of an ark to sail into the future.  He chooses the 3^rd.  White’s counterculture prescriptions are obscure and airy, as he waxes lyrical about creative essayism and the 1960s in San Francisco, a city which has now been colonized by corporate big tech.  I was expecting something more grounded, more factual, not a collection of quotes from Nietzsche, Adorno, Freud and Rozak. 

White seems to be limited to Marx’s humanism, which concerned alienation, commodity fetishism, praxis and creativity.  He writes as if no one would build houses, grow vegetables or configure software in a future counterculture.  His idea is that a creative counterculture is ‘impertinent’ and ‘improvisational’ and should be attractive to those sick of the failing grind of capital.   So a reader has to take him at his words alone.

 

White insists that you have to think beyond politics to culture.  The idea of a counterculture originated with the European Romantics in the 1800s - Wordsworth, Shelley, Yeats, Coleridge, Byron, Blake, Baudelaire.  The Romantics were a social movement, not just an artistic event.  It was a mostly middle-class and declass reaction against capitalism’s industrial revolution.  This counterculture continued and changed as time went on, as it practitioners were called Bohemians, transcendentalists, existentialists, beatniks, hippies, hipsters and so on.  He is hoping that they can create the dominant social form as capital slowly whimpers, then collapses.  The ruling class in their upscale protected enclaves; the artists and some working class in their down-to-earth city and country communes; and evidently a wasteland for the rest.

 

Like Zizek, White analyzes the issues through film and books – for instance the issue of ‘place.’  According to White, “precarity has become a generalized existential condition for all of us,” as place is disappearing.  He criticizes Ai Weiwei’s 2017 depiction of human migration in the documentary Human Flow – as if Weiwei was doing a National Geographic animal special about African gazelles.  He compares that to Agnes’ Varda’s film Faces Places, which painted the faces of ordinary workers onto the buildings they worked in.  In other discussions he makes fun of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop; deconstructs the Disney movie Black Panther from a familiar left point of view; gives props to Spike Lee and the film ‘Get Out; looks at the Australian film Walkabout and the English one Glastonbury Fayre; takes apart Ken Burn’s imperialist documentary The Vietnam War and analyzes the one-sided documentary on the Rajneeshis in Oregon, Wild Wild Country.

 

White, who seems to be heavily inspired by Buddhism, describes various types of ‘stupidity.’  Convenient stupidity allows you to believe and fit in with the lies of American culture – God, nation, good wars, racism, whiteness, elections, money, etc.  This leads to ‘sacrificial stupidity’ which allows people to die for the ruling class in various ways and to oppose their own economic and political interests for some shallow sense of belonging. Then he introduces ‘inconvenient’ stupidity, which allows you to not entirely believe the first stupids.  This can lead to ‘post-stupidity,’ where you can become ‘transcendentally stupid’ – i.e. rejecting the whole of society’s cant.  To White these are the “class traitors, resistors, agitators, trouble-makers, rebels, artists, dropouts, anarchists and revolutionaries.”  This is the episodic human yeast that he thinks will create a counterculture.

 

Venezuelan People's Communes Exist Throughout the Country

To White this piece-meal counterculture presently consists of the growth of workers cooperatives, Fight for $15, local food and sanctuary cities.  In the future he invokes a dissolution of the archaic nation state into regions governed by themselves – a fabled ‘mosaic of subcultures.’  Which in reality will look more like a failed state governed by warlords and various political factions.

 

White’s historical pessimism about revolution is because there is no longer a unitary working class – “what we have now are separate systems of wretchedness in a social context that is radically anti-communal.”  If true I don’t see how a majority counterculture can be built out of the same human material.  At bottom this is an argument for historical pessimism, an argument he was not trying to make in spite of the title of the book.  Most large historical commune developments in France, Italy, China, Rojava and Venezuela came out of revolutions.  The logical result of only pursuing a counterculture will be deep ecology survivalism, Orlov-style, and nothing else.

 

Other prior blog reviews on this subject, or mentioned in the book, use blog search box, upper left:  “Nomadland,” “Zizek,” “Iowa Writers Workshop,” “Zappa,” “Society of the Spectacle,” “Black Panther,” “Spike Lee,” “Get Out,” “Ken Burns,” “No Local,” “Daydream Sunset,” “Cool Town,” “Orlov,” “Hippie Modernism.”

 

And I bought it at May Day Books!

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Red Frog

September 15, 2020