{"id":3734,"date":"2021-06-01T21:28:01","date_gmt":"2021-06-01T18:28:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/metacpc.org\/?p=3734"},"modified":"2021-06-01T21:28:04","modified_gmt":"2021-06-01T18:28:04","slug":"jonas-staal-collectivizations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/metacpc.org\/en\/jonas-staal-collectivizations\/","title":{"rendered":"Jonas Staal Collectivizations"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Decades of capitalist propaganda have reduced the notion of collectivization to Stalinist terror. This flattening of the term dismisses the breadth of forms that collectivization can take: from nationalizing communal resources and production, to other-than-human redistribution efforts to establish comradely ecologies. We need a more serious analysis of the different forms and outcomes of collectivization efforts in egalitarian movements around the world, from the deep past to recent history. The success of anti-collectivist propaganda also keeps us from revalidating collectivization\u2019s present-day importance for regaining control over common resources in the face of massive extraction by trillion-dollar companies. It is therefore essential to explore the collectivized imaginaries and practices\u2014collectivizations<\/em>, in the plural\u2014that make egalitarian forms of life imaginable and actionable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. Other Collectivizations<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In capitalist propaganda, the notion of collectivization, its multiple meanings and forms of implementation, are trapped in a time capsule labelled \u201ctotalitarianism.\u201d It is ridiculed and demonized by historians such as Oleg Khlevniuk, who decries Stalin\u2019s 1929 proclamation for the construction of large-scale collective farms (kolkhozes<\/em>) as the \u201cbrainchild of socialist fanatics.\u201d1Other historians, less driven by anti-communism, such as Moshe Lewin, argue that while the brutal costs in lives and the use of state terror in the era of Stalinist collectivization are undeniable, \u201cThe whole set of repressive and terrorist measures has too often monopolized the attention of researchers, at the expense of the broader panorama of social changes and state building.\u201d2 In this light, Lewin emphasizes that the very use of the term \u201ccollective\u201d was inappropriate. He argues instead that the kolkhoz<\/em> was \u201ca hybrid structure containing incompatible principles \u2026 without ever becoming either a cooperative, a factory, or a private farm.\u201d3 Such an approach turns the usual critique of Soviet collectivization on its head: rather than being all-encompassing, it might not have even been collective enough to be called collectivization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Early reports by writer Maurice Hindus on the creation of the kolkhozes are an important record for engaging with Lewin\u2019s call for a \u201cbroader panorama\u201d on collectivization. A Russian-American \u00e9migr\u00e9, Hindus returned to his home village to describe the collectivization process, published in his 1931 book Red Bread<\/em>. He observes the protests by the peasant population against the relentless liquidation of the kulaks<\/em> (property-owning peasants), whose families, if lucky, faced the choice between exile or joining the kolkhoz. But he simultaneously witnesses the creation of free nurseries and cultural centers across the countryside, guaranteed maternity leave for kolkhoz members, the success of cooperative stores, emancipation from the firm grip of the Orthodox Church, and the liberation of women from marriage entrapment and subservience. Hindus is unscrupulous in speaking of \u201cdictatorial Soviet standards,\u201d4 but this does not keep him from seeing the Soviet Revolution as a \u201cdouble-armed power\u201d of both repression and mass emancipation.5 One does not redeem the other, nor does one legitimize the other, but they are equally real parts of its history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Maurice Hindus, Red Bread<\/em>, 1931 (opening page).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It is a great historical loss that we have come to identify collectivization\u2019s inherent relentlessness<\/em> with state-imposed mass violence, due to Stalinist terror and enduring anti-communist propaganda. In recent decades, other terms such as \u201ccommoning\u201d and the \u201ccommons\u201d have been employed to recuperate the spirit of historical, emancipatory struggles against the primacy of private property. But as Silvia Federici writes, \u201cSince at least the early 1990s, the language of the commons has been appropriated by the World Bank and the United Nations and put at the service of privatization.\u201d6 In contrast to this neoliberal use of commoning language, a feminist theory of the commons, argues Federici, builds on \u201cthe collective experiences, the knowledge, and the struggles that women have accumulated concerning reproductive work, a history that has been an essential part of our resistance to capitalism.\u201d7 Contrary to how those international organizations co-opt the term, Federici concludes that such a feminist theory of the commons entails the \u201ccollectivization of our everyday work of reproduction.\u201d8<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Federici\u2019s use of the term \u201ccollectivization\u201d distinguishes it from the capitalist capture of the commons, where commoning takes the form of World Bank microcredit policing and a demand for some form of preexisting property or physical ableness on the part of the commoner. Collectivization, however, is fundamentally indiscriminate: it completely rejects debt, and does not care whether people are \u201cproductive\u201d bodies or not. Collectivization is relentless not because it is a priori violent, but because it includes and applies to everyone and everything.9<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just as Federici theorizes collectivization from a feminist perspective, there are many other historical and contemporary examples that resist the reduction of the term to Stalinist repression. The terrible famine of 1959\u201361 is adduced to discredit Chinese communes, but this entirely ignores\u2014as Joshua Eisenman writes\u2014the successes of the subsequent \u201cgreen revolution\u201d in China. Due to reforms of the nationwide agricultural research and extension system undertaken during the Cultural Revolution, experts rotating across communes pushed innovations and farming techniques. By the time of decollectivization in the early eighties, the communes had reached \u201chistorically high levels of agricultural productivity per unit land and per unit labor, life expectancy, basic literacy, and the promulgation of bookkeeping and vocational skills.\u201d10 The communes were dismantled not because they were a failure, but because the reformist faction of Deng Xiaoping regarded them as too successful an inheritance of the Maoist era to keep in place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Film still from Robin Shuffield\u2019s Thomas Sankara: The Upright Man <\/em>(2006) depicting Sankara\u2019s 1985 tree planting campaign known as One Village, One Grove. <\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Thomas Sankara\u2019s leadership of Burkina Faso (1983\u201387) embodies yet another take on the practice of collectivization, this time through an eco-socialist, anti-colonial, and anti-imperialist paradigm\u2014another kind of \u201cgreen revolution.\u201d This manifested most famously in Sankara\u2019s 1985 campaign to plant ten million trees, which aimed to turn reforestation and mass planting into a new \u201cnational and cultural tradition.\u201d11 Here, collectivization cannot be reduced to the totalitarian clich\u00e9 of state-imposed industrial farming, but manifests instead as an interdependent ecology of human and nonhuman workers: trees and humans struggle together for socialist self-determination. For Sankara, the campaign was a struggle against desertification, but also a struggle for resources that would sustain the country\u2019s sovereignty from World Bank feudalism. In his words:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our struggle for the trees and forests is first and foremost a democratic and popular struggle. Because a handful of forestry engineers and experts getting themselves all worked up in a sterile and costly manner will never accomplish anything! Nor can the worked-up consciences of a multitude of forums and institutions\u2014sincere and praiseworthy though they may be\u2014make the Sahel green again, when we lack the funds to drill wells for drinking water a hundred meters deep, while money abounds to drill oil wells three thousand meters deep!12<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

It is exactly this notion of self-determination that resonates with Coni Ledesma, representative of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP), when she speaks of the Bungkalan<\/em> as a contemporary collectivization practice. In Filipino, Bungkalan means \u201cto cultivate,\u201d and relates to peasants and farmworkers who have been promised land reform, to no avail, and instead take collective repossession of idle lands on the islands of Negros, Mindanao, and Luzon, among others\u2014despite continuing disappearances and murders perpetrated by the military. Rather than depending on massive state intervention, Ledesma describes how \u201cfarmers and sugar workers take their destiny and their lives in their own hands,\u201d as a practice of collectivization in the here and now.13<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With such examples in mind\u2014from Federici to the Chinese communes and from Sankara\u2019s eco-socialism to the Bungkalan\u2014it would be better to speak of a history of collectivizations<\/em> in the plural. As Vijay Prashad remarks, there needs to be a history of \u201cpolycentric communism\u201d in thought that is not \u201ccentered around Moscow and Soviet foreign policy.\u201d14 This helps to not only reconsider the pluralist histories of collectivizations in the past, but to also redefine collectivization struggles against the theft of common resources in the present and future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Film still from Ridley Scott\u2019s Blade Runner <\/em>(1982).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

2. Trillion-Dollar Dispossessions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Faced with the rise of trillion-dollar companies such as Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Bayer (Monsanto), with their massive extraction operations, there is an evident urgency to redefine the role of collectivization for egalitarian politics today, in order to reclaim control over political, economic, and social commons. When trying to grasp the vastness of the monopolization of resources by these companies, researchers draw parallels to the histories and presents of colonial empires. Siva Vaidhyanathan writes that \u201cbetween Google and Facebook we have witnessed a global concentration of wealth and power not seen since the British and Dutch East India Companies ruled vast territories, millions of people, and the most valuable trade routes.\u201d15Yanis Varoufakis claims that \u201cthe East India Company was no aberration\u201d but should rather be considered the historical template that result in \u201cmega-corporations like Amazon, Facebook, Google and ExxonMobil, which are effectively beyond the control of any nation-state.\u201d16 Shoshana Zuboff argues that trillion-dollar companies are part of an era of \u201csurveillance capitalism\u201d and engage in neocolonial \u201cdigital dispossession,\u201d with the result that \u201cclaims to self-determination have vanished from the maps of our own experience.\u201d17<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zuboff\u2019s reference to self-determination is relevant here if we want to understand the multiple forms of dispossession carried out by these trillion-dollar companies. As Karl Marx phrased it, the means of production are \u201cthe means of absorption of the labor of others,\u201d meaning that \u201cit is no longer the worker who employs the means of production, but the means of production which employs the worker.\u201d18 This analysis seems fully applicable to Zuboff\u2019s conception of surveillance capitalism, for in digital dispossession, data consumers also function as data workers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jodi Dean questions whether this form of surveillance capitalism is not better understood as a form of neofeudalism: \u201cCities and states relate to Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google\/Alphabet as if these corporations were themselves sovereign states\u2014negotiating with, trying to attract, and cooperating with them on their terms.\u201d19 In Dean\u2019s words, trillion-dollar companies are \u201cdoubly extractive,\u201d because \u201cplatforms not only position themselves so that their use is basically necessary (like banks, credit cards, phones, and roads) but that their use generates data for their owners.\u201d20 Facebook and Alphabet are less concerned with selling products to their users than with extracting behavioral data to sell to commercial and political advertisers, with the goal of eventually predicting future behavior in order to ensure guaranteed outcomes. While consuming, users are providing labor, just as that labor simultaneously becomes a form of consumption. In Blade Runner<\/em> (1982), the bioengineered \u201creplicant\u201d Rachael perfectly summarizes the conditions for users of these platforms: \u201cI\u2019m not in the business. I am the business.\u201d 

When taking\u2014consuming\u2014a smart car for a spin, the driver is also operating as a data worker whose behavioral information is extracted to benefit restaurants and stores en route. The expanding internet of things uses our health monitoring apps to anticipate when we will become hungry, or our Google searches to predict when we will desire a new item of clothing. In the smart-city phantasmagoria, the world becomes a vast data mine that is excavated to predict our behavior, both as workers and consumers.21 This is what leads Vaidhyanathan to argue that if corporations such as Facebook merely recognized users as clients<\/em> instead of resources, this alone could be considered revolutionary.22<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, it is important to emphasize that extraction through digital means remains a fundamentally material operation. This is exemplified by a recent lawsuit against Apple, Google, Dell, Microsoft, and Tesla based on field research conducted by antislavery economist Siddharth Kara, filed on behalf of families of children who were killed or injured at cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The primary phase of dispossession does not involve neofeudal data workers using their smartphones, laptops, and electric cars, but rather those who are forced to mine the materials to create these infrastructures and interfaces in the first place.23<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This doesn\u2019t mean, however, that people in the Global South are not also mined for data by trillion-dollar companies. Facebook piloted its \u201cinternet.org\u201d project, later renamed \u201cFree Basics,\u201d under the guise of providing free internet to regions of the world that have limited access. The project was advertised as part of the company\u2019s mission to \u201cconnect the world.\u201d But the services were only free for limited apps, such as Facebook, and everything was hosted on Facebook\u2019s servers. The goal, then, was to essentially replace the internet with Facebook.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This did not go without resistance: Indian net activists successfully fought Facebook for infringing on net-neutrality principles, leading to internet.org\u2019s withdrawal from the country in 2016.24 But in many other countries, Facebook successfully contracted with governments to implement Free Basics, which in turn gave the company undue influence on national affairs. In the Philippines, where Free Basics went into effect in 2015, Facebook employees advised various candidates on their digital campaigns during the presidential elections of 2016. The winner, authoritarian Rodrigo Duterte, turned Facebook into his main media service, banning independent press from covering his inauguration.25 A year later, Facebook and the Duterte regime entered into a partnership to lay new underwater data cables, forging a profitable relation that ties Facebook indefinitely to Duterte\u2019s murderous \u201cwar on drugs\u201d campaign and his current push for an \u201canti-terror\u201d bill to rid himself of any form of leftist opposition.26 Facebook might have been praised for its all-too-late suspension of Donald Trump\u2019s account after his neofascist followers stormed the United States Capitol, but Trump\u2019s incompetent authoritarianism is child\u2019s play compared to Duterte\u2019s Facebook-sponsored regime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The emergence of neofeudalism\u2014or \u201ctechno-feudalism\u201d in the words of Varoufakis27\u2014thus threatens self-determination in various ways: through multiple forms of dispossession, these companies extract our labor, equally as workers and as consumers; they dismantle any remaining notion of privacy; they structurally undermine democratic oversight and shared ownership; and they enable new forms of authoritarian (corporate) government. What twenty-first century collectivized imaginaries and collectivization practices might help us reclaim ownership over our common resources?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Left: Public protests on Black Friday in Bangladesh. Right: Projection on the wall of Amazon\u2019s headquarters on Black Friday in London; both part of the Make Amazon Pay <\/em>campaign coordinated by UNI Global Union and Progressive International. Courtesy of Progressive International.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

3. Collectivized Imaginaries<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

As we consider contemporary strategies for collectivizing resources and forms of technology, it is important to remember that users are the ones who initially funded these trillion-dollar companies\u2014not just through unpaid data work as described above, but also through public investment, without which these companies could not have come into existence in the first place. Apple\u2019s so-called \u201cinnovations\u201d are inconceivable without US government\u2013financed technological research.28Amazon could not have kickstarted its operations without the publicly funded postal system of the US and other countries, through which it continues to be subsidized;29 and as Andreas Petrossiants remarks, \u201cMany of Amazon\u2019s workers are so underpaid that they receive what little welfare benefits still exist in the US\u2014meaning taxpayer money is essentially funding the social reproduction of Amazon workers.\u201d30 Alphabet would not exist without the knowledge production of others, who provide its search engine\u2019s content.31 Bayer would be of no value if it did not steal decades and centuries of seed knowledges and practices from farmers and Indigenous peoples.32 That users have collectively worked for these companies, paid for them, and been expropriated by them, without renumeration of any kind, frames the core argument for transferring them to collective ownership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such an endeavor is not without precedent. At certain critical moments in history, even liberal-democratic societies have recognized that private enterprise can disproportionately impact public well-being; in these moments, some companies and sectors have been placed under public control. During the 2008 financial crisis, a number of banks were (temporarily or partially) nationalized\u2014Northern Rock in the United Kingdom, Bankia in Spain, ABN Amro in the Netherlands\u2014when their criminal dealings in financial derivatives ruined the lives of precarious people all over the world. Spain temporarily nationalized private health care during the coronavirus pandemic.33 While these actions were taken primarily to rescue a disastrous economic system, they nonetheless display a recognition that banks and privatized health care threaten collective self-determination. The same recognition should be extended to trillion-dollar companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is in this light that Wendy Liu argues for \u201cmore democratic control over the online platforms we spend so much time on, through user ownership, state ownership, stronger regulation, or decentralization.\u201d Liu further emphasizes the need to \u201cincreas[e] worker mobility\u201d through portable personal data, which could be moved from one platform to another in order to block further monopolization, and to deprive trillion-dollar companies of their \u201ccontrol over intellectual property.\u201d34<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Regaining democratic control over trillion-dollar companies also means repurposing them to serve the public good. Nationalization campaigner Paris Marx argues that the logistical urgencies of the coronavirus pandemic provide further rationale for placing Amazon under public ownership, by integrating it into the United States Postal Service (USPS):<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The key task of a publicly owned Amazon in this moment of crisis would be to maintain the supply chain so it can continue delivering the necessities that people rely on, with priority given to those items. However, it should also begin preparing for the large-scale delivery of packages containing food staples and essential items to every home in the country, making use of the combined labor power of USPS and Amazon delivery workers, but also the infrastructure that only the USPS has: post offices all across the country, even in small rural communities that aren\u2019t economical for private-package delivery companies to service.35<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This is not the end of the nationalization effort Marx proposes. He also argues that Amazon\u2019s web services, its infrastructure, and its data centers could become a \u201cstrong backbone\u201d for a publicly owned internet. Whole Foods, an Amazon subsidiary, could be \u201creoriented to make a food hall that provides food to the community\u201d and could also serve as a foundation for an expanded Meals on Wheels program. Amazon Studios could be reorganized to produce smaller, mid-budget indie and alternative films, which are currently marginalized to nonexistence due to the increased consolidation of large production studios that prioritize blockbuster output.36<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Liu\u2019s and Marx\u2019s demands for democratic oversight and public ownership resonate with current workplace mobilization. The global campaign Make Amazon Pay, coordinated by Global UNI and Progressive International, was launched on \u201cBlack Friday\u201d in 2020, demanding workplace improvements and job security for Amazon employees, a reversal of the company\u2019s ban on unionization, a commitment from Amazon to achieve carbon neutrality, and full taxation of the retail giant.37 When the campaign was launched, tens of thousands of Amazon workers gathered in front of warehouses across the world, from Bangladesh to India, Australia to Brazil, the United States to the United Kingdom, Germany, and Poland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The visual morphology of the campaign, which I developed together with Remco van Bladel in close dialogue with the organizers, aimed at two things. Firstly, the famous Amazon logo, which can be read as both a smile and a forward arrow, was doubled and placed on a red canvas to emphasize the demand to return<\/em>: return rights to Amazon workers, return their hard work by providing benefits and financial security, return the environmental costs of excess carbon emissions, return the profits earned through tax avoidance. Secondly, hijacking and socializing Amazon\u2019s visual identity was also intended as a first step toward the company\u2019s replacement<\/em>: our campaign symbols gestured towards a future Amazon owned and governed by its workers and users.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jonas Staal and Jan Fermon, Collectivize Facebook,<\/em> 2020-ongoing. HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Creating a \u201cvisual portal\u201d that points towards a future of workers\u2019 ownership and self-governance is also central to the collective action lawsuit against Facebook that I initiated with human rights lawyer Jan Fermon, which we will file at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. In line with Zuboff, we argue that the ownership model of Facebook and other trillion-dollar companies fundamentally infringes on the self-determination of peoples and individuals. As a consequence, we demand that the Council recognize Facebook as a public entity, and transfer ownership to its 2.8 billion users.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We are asking neither to reform nor nationalize Facebook: our approach to collectivization aims to turn the Facebook platform into a transnational cooperative<\/em>, owned and governed by its users.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To replace the economy of extractivism and private ownership with a common, collectivized economy, cultural work is crucial. In Varoufakis\u2019s political sci-fi book Another Now <\/em>(2020), we encounter a parallel reality in which the 2008 financial crisis did not result in a consolidation of techno-feudalism; instead, it marked a fundamental turning point towards a \u201ccorpo-syndicalist\u201d alternative. In this \u201canother now,\u201d a movement called Ossify Wall Street brings a new group into being: the Ossify Capitalism Rebels. Their actions target both physical spaces and the digital realms of techno-feudalism. Employing a \u201cdouble strike\u201d strategy, the OC Rebels help organize a strike among Facebook workers; at the same time, they convince masses of Facebook users not to log on, starving the company of valuable data.38 Other major \u201ctech strikes\u201d follow, forcing a halt to the extraction economy of Facebook and other trillion-dollar companies. Feeling the pressure, the political class passes a new Digital Rights Act that guarantees every person on earth full property rights over their own data:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Starved of their targeted advertising revenues and access to stock exchanges, the new shareholders of Google, Facebook and their ilk\u2014employees owning one share each\u2014were forced to seek the financial support of their community of users. In a surprisingly short time, what used to be the world\u2019s greatest and greediest private monopolies had mutated into vast digital communes.39<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Varoufakis shows the power of the cultural imaginary to recognize our current present as criminal, compared to the feasible pathways towards the digital communes of another now. It is in this light that we should see the work of the TESA Collective, which creates cooperative board games. It is hard to name a popular game, book, or film that does not involve a storyline based on a predatory win-or-lose dichotomy\u2014and this shows how culturally embedded the extractive imaginary truly is. From Monopoly<\/em> to Risk<\/em> and Settlers of<\/em> Catan<\/em>, many board-game players are trained from an early age to understand narrative excitement through the theft of the commons: my gain is based on everyone else\u2019s loss. The TESA Collective\u2019s games, such as Co-Opoly, Rise-Up<\/em>, and Strike<\/em>, are instead based on collectively identifying shared oppressors\u2014private capital and authoritarian governments. These games task players with creating large coalitions among workers, faith communities, students, alternative media outlets, and other groups, helping to train future social-movement organizers and cooperative members.40 We find real-life applications of such cooperative efforts in Clara Balaguer\u2019s project Troll Palayan<\/em>, which organizes meme-creation workshops, or what she calls \u201corganic troll farms\u201d (\u201cpalayan<\/em>\u201d means \u201crice paddy\u201d in Filipino). The projects aims to reclaim the joys of collective memology to \u201cdismantle toxicity in cyberspace.\u201d41<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In these examples\u2014from Paris Marx\u2019s mappings of nationalized trillion-dollar companies, to Varoufakis\u2019s description of another now, to the training of cooperative mentalities by TESA Collective and Balaguer\u2014collectivized imaginaries serve as the foundation for constructing collectivized realities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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TESA Collective, Rise Up: The Game of People & Power, <\/em>2017. <\/em>Courtesy of TESA Collective. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

4. Ninety-Four Million Years of Collectivism<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Capitalism\u2014along with its neo- and techno-feudal mutations\u2014is maintained in part by a certain origin myth. Unjust systems of predation are portrayed as an inherent part of the \u201ccircle of life\u201d or \u201chuman nature.\u201d Through this narrative, collectivization is framed as a rarity in history, as a utopian glitch that may be desirable but is in fact incompatible with human reality. Collectivization might look good on paper, but not in practice. In this line of thought, capitalism is naturalized: it is not what we want, it\u2019s simply what we are<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nick Estes challenges this origin story by arguing that \u201cIndigenous ways of relating to human and other-than-human life exist in opposition to capitalism, which transforms both humans and nonhumans into labor and commodities to be bought and sold.\u201d42 Furthering this argument, the Red Nation coalition\u2014of which Estes is a member\u2014demands \u201cdignified lives as Native peoples who are free to perform our purpose as stewards of life if we are to protect and respect our nonhuman relatives\u2014the land, the water, the air, the plants, and the animals.\u201d43 Through this emphasis on comradely relationality within ecosystems, the notion of private property\u2014of legalized theft\u2014is rejected. The struggle for collectivization today, then, is no novelty, because collectivized practices preceded capitalism all over the planet. In their proposition for a \u201cRed Natural History,\u201d Not An Alternative refers to this as a \u201cworld in common,\u201d existing as a horizon within our world of capitalist capture.44<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Capitalism\u2019s origin myth even reaches further back than humans have existed on earth. For a long time, geologists claimed that the carnivorous \u201cCambrian Explosion\u201d that occurred 541 million years ago was the evolutionary leap that resulted in complex life on earth. But for decades geologists ignored facts that contradicted this view\u2014which might have something to do with their inability to imagine that complex life could result from anything other than capitalist predation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, in the geological era immediately preceding the predatory Cambrian Period\u2014known as the \u201cEdiacaran Period\u201d\u2014complex life-forms coexisted in a cooperative, nonpredatory oceanic world. The Ediacaran Period lasted from 635 to 541 million years ago\u2014ninety-four million years of collectivism. In is in this light that geologist Mark McMenamin asks, \u201cDo socialism and capitalism have, fundamentally, an ecological basis?\u201d\u2014implying that the Ediacaran could be considered a period of pre-socialist socialism, and the Cambrian as a period of pre-capitalist capitalism.45Ediacaran biota resemble disks, worm-like shapes, and elegant plant-like forms characterized by a quilted body architecture. They are regarded as neither plants nor animals, their existence defying biological and gendered classification. Their collectivized ecology operated through photosymbiosis, chemosymbiosis, and osmotrophy, recirculating nutrients amongst one another, making predation unnecessary.46<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Rangea, Swartpuntia, Kimberella, and Alexandra Kollontai with Charnia.Jonas Staal, 94 Million Years of Collectivism <\/em>(detail of storyboard study),2020\u201321. Gouache on paper. Courtesy of the artist. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Ediacaran is named after the Ediacaran Hills in South Australia, home of the Adnyamathanha people. We might thus evoke here the Aboriginal concept and practice of The Dreaming, where ancestors and descendants coexist.47 Do Ediacaran biota, such as Charnia, Rangea, Kimberella, Swartpuntia, Spriggina, and Ernietta, coexist in a dream space with Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Alexandra Kollontai, Rosa Luxemburg, H\u1ed3 Ch\u00ed Minh, C\u00e9lia Sanchez, and Thomas Sankara? Do they share the same dream, or dream of one another, beyond time and across space? A dream of socialized ecologies of coexistence, a dream of perpetual redistribution and collectivization of life? These questions belong to the field of \u201cProletgeology\u201d: earth-memory studies of other-than-human proletarian and collectivist life-forms.48<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While we should not naturalize the ninety-four-million-year Ediacaran Period as a pre-socialist socialism the way the ruling classes naturalize capitalism, it is essential to recognize that human and other-than-human work towards collectivization is as much a part of our deep history as of our struggles in the present. Our challenge today is to solidarize these dreams and imaginaries to collectivize worlds for all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want to thank Adwait Singh, iLiana Fokianaki, and Andreas Petrossiants for their editorial support in writing this essay. I further want to thank Singh and Mihnea Mircan for our ongoing conversations about Ediacaran collectivism, and Proletgeologist Vincent W. J. van Gerven Oei for his counsel. Part of the research for this essay emerged from the \u201cCollectivizations\u201dinterview series that I co-programmed with Marina Otero Verzier and Flora van Gaalen for Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jonas Staal<\/strong>\u00a0is a visual artist whose work deals with the relation between art, propaganda, and democracy. His most recent book is\u00a0Propaganda Art in the 21st Century<\/em>\u00a0(MIT Press, 2019). \u00a9 2021 e-flux and the author<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Source: https:\/\/www.e-flux.com\/journal\/118\/394239\/collectivizations\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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