Greeting everyone,

I’m unable to join the live event but wanted to share these thoughts. Hope they make can contribute to your discussion.

Best wishes,

Pallav Das

Thanks again, John and Ken, for affording us this wonderful space for concerned expression and for the stimulating discussion, which has followed over the last couple of weeks. It was somewhat uncanny and bizarre that it all happened during and in the aftermath of the elections, as if time itself was mocking us in anticipation of our inevitable urge to curl up into our safe spaces after having offered our earnest declamations. It has challenged our intellectual integrity and somehow it does feel like a catharsis — this moment of copious incertitude. But what does it mean, and more so in the context of our projections for 2050? And how do we deal with this moment? And, in fact, how do we deal with our emotions about it?

I go back to what Wen Stephenson said in one of his responses, “What I most fear losing is our humanity.” That is a strikingly palpable fear, because it hits at the very essence of our being. How do we define ourselves in the modern world? Erik Assadourian has given us an insight into our modern shackled existence – tethered as we are to things and to consumerism. If we are what we wear, what we drive, what we watch, what we covet and what we feel empty inside from even after acquiring it, then when do we ever feel human? Or, have we reached a point in our evolution when we’re human only in the context of a “thing”, and relate to other similarly contextualized beings? Then, as Erik’s analysis seems to foretell, we’ll continue to gobble up this planet till there is nothing more to gobble up – one planet, two, three?

Neoliberal market fundamentalism demands the supremacy of markets over the society and communities, and that of corporate profits over people. In the last three decades since Reagan/Thatcher, the entire political process has worked towards ensuring that. It’s only logical that now that process is run by one of the marquee representatives of the market. Is this a floating of a trial balloon moment when the corporate elite have finally dispensed with the need for a political agent like a Clinton or a Bush in the oval office, and decided to experiment with putting one of their own on the throne? Why rule through others when you could have a firmer grip over the entirety of the production process by being on top of the national executive branch? (And, the imperious command over the other two branches makes that domination more efficient).

What are the possible ways of getting back in touch with our humanity? Under Ashish’s leadership, Kalpavriksh, the Indian environmental action group has been grappling with that question. As we often do in critical moments of our individual and collective existence, we’ve gone back to Mahatma Gandhi for insights and inspiration. For him political opposition to the British could not be separated from a struggle against the economic system they had imposed on India. Gandhi introduced the seminal idea of Swaraj or self-rule to the intellectual debate against British colonialism through a pamphlet called Hind Swaraj (Indian Self Rule) in 1909. For him, though, the term was not confined to its literal meaning and Gandhi expanded it to connote the idea of self-restraint. Swaraj, for him, was as much of a guiding principal of his life as were non-violence and truth. Gandhi wanted the quest for independence to be a quest for self-restraint and not just self-rule. He said, “…..(Swaraj) will be the fruit of patience, perseverance, ceaseless toil, courage and intelligent appreciation of the environment…. “ Gandhi wanted to prepare the ground for establishing a socio-economic system in post-independence India, which was not subservient to technology and machines, and which was not mired in self-delusional consumerist greed. Instead, the new Indian dispensation, for Gandhi, would be guided by an ethical acceptance of self-restraint – to everyone according to their need, not according to their want and desire.

Gandhi’s ideas and philosophy resonate with us even today, and more so in the context of climate justice. Capitalism, in its quest for endless growth, needs to extend its reach to the farthest corners of the world for natural resources, to enclose new ‘commons’ for exploitation and extraction. But, along with that need for resources, the global capital also requires to commodify spheres of life and social processes, which have been hitherto untouched by the market and its pernicious logic of profit, such as the tribal areas of the central Indian peninsula. Kalpavriksh has found energy and inspiration in the dignified opposition that is emerging from these areas. The flowering of degrowth ideas amidst the political and economic chaos of contemporary India is an unusual development. It is not the exasperated cry of ecological economists like Herman Daly, Tim Jackson and Andrew Simms for respecting the global environmental thresholds; it’s not the sudden rediscovery of the computer simulations of the “Limits Of Growth” study; it’s not the realization that unfettered capitalism is the prime cause of climate change and is leading to calamitous societal disruptions worldwide. Instead, it’s the reminder of Gandhi’s idea of self-restraint, which, again, not surprisingly, has not emerged from the intellectual centers of Indian academia or from its cultural elites but has germinated in the existence of the country’s so called “backward” tribal and agrarian communities living in the proximity of nature.

As Ashish explained in his presentation, Kalpavriksh has also created a platform for establishing, organizing, advocating, researching, documenting and synthesizing alternative practices and thinking on alternative economic, social and political ways of being which are environmentally sustainable and economically egalitarian. It’s called Vikalp Sangam or Confluence of Alternatives in Hindi (www.vikalpsangam.org). Please read Ashish’s recent article which sums up the operative ideas behind this initiative and how they’re unfolding in India, (http://www.countercurrents.org/2016/11/03/the-search-for-radical-alternatives-key-elements-and-principles/).

The emerging community based alternatives in India are creating a new blend of politics and development. They are trying to promote direct democracy, bottom up model of development, cooperative rather than market fundamentalist economy, gender egalitarianism and consultative, non-hierarchical decision-making. These models are rooted as much in the Gandhian principals of non-cooperation, non-violence, self-restraint and self-reliance as they are in the modern intellectual formulations of degrowth. Surprisingly, a much discounted yet spirited adversary in the deep hinterland of India is challenging the intellectual fallacy of endless growth with uncanny resolve and rigor. John had emphasized the need for, “New kinds of parties to take political power that come out of and are held to the fire by the biggest, broadest, most radical climate justice movements the world has ever seen. And I mean *really* new kinds of party, all over the world, in whatever forms local circumstances call for. Parties never yet seen, but which flow from the new thinking of the vibrant global movements for radical social change of this century.” We look at Vikalp Sangam as a possible way to reach that political goal, but it may be more than just that, more holistic and meaningful than we can imagine at the moment.

Lastly, I would like to refer to what Ken had underlined in one of his responses, about the need for education for youngsters. That is what we consider the quest for a new and dynamic narrative, and in our opinion it’s not just the young, everybody needs to re-educate themselves in the face of the approaching climate emergencies. A few years ago, we had launched a website as a platform to test our ideas about what we’ve called “Radical Ecological Democracy (RED). Our idea behind marrying the concepts of ecology and democracy stemmed from the conviction that the struggle for socio-economic justice and political equality for the vast number of disempowered people in the world was directly linked to the struggle against the rapacious exploitation of nature resulting in the ecological and climate emergency that our planet is facing today. The website was conceived with the objective of championing and advancing the idea of people’s democratic ownership of their ecological future. It has had remarkable success in a short time in engaging a large number of people in those ideas. We think it’s time to plan the next steps. It’s our belief that the RED website can and must aim for a larger and more constructively active profile so that it becomes a fulcrum for meaningful change. We would like RED to become the hopeful home for people thinking about, working towards and fighting for that future. It’s our hope that the participants of this conference would like to join us on RED. We would love to learn from your experience and thinking and share that with a wider audience.

Yes, these are anxious times. They somehow remind us of the Weimar Republic, when the façade of democracy disintegrated in a hurry and every political impulse got subsumed as in the late 1920s and the 30s by raw expressions of militant contempt for the other, and its quick degeneration into methodical violence and ethnic mass extermination? But, we’re much better prepared to contest that possibility. We’ll fight for our humanity and for this planet. As Engels said (known by way of Rosa Luxemburg’s explanation), “ Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.” And as that man of rare nobility and wisdom, Che Guevara, warned us, “We have no right to believe that freedom can be won without struggle.”

In solidarity,

Pallav Das