This is the second part of a conversation between Dave Darby of Lowimpact.org and Jem Bendell, professor of sustainability leadership at the University of Cumbria, and author of the now famous 2018 Deep Adaptation paper that claimed that we’re on an inevitable path to civilisational collapse. Here’s part one, about the way that capitalism is collapsing, and here’s a review of his new book, Breaking Together that we published a few weeks ago.

Dave: I want to talk about those who say we need some sort of authoritarian control to solve our problems. Most people still see our responses as being controlled from the centre, don’t they? But centralised power always ends up authoritarian – whether it’s bought by the super-wealthy or seized by the super-violent or wriggled into by the super-ideological. Most people can see we’re in trouble, but ideas about what to do about it are very different, aren’t they?

Jem: yeah – I’d go back to the issue of how painful it is to be an environmentalist now – working hard and trying new ideas to bring about change, but seeing everything going the wrong way. And we’ve all been brought up in a patriarchal society where we’re told that we need strict daddies or the kids will hurt themselves. So we’re in a panicked, desperate state, understandably, and some environmentalists believe that we need a mythical strict daddy to come and fix it for us. This is often mixed with the idea that human nature is just not good enough – but we’ll have a magical big daddy who will force us all to change in ways that are good for us. Of course, that’s stupid, and often, when people are saying that, they’re thinking that they’ll be part of the big daddy consortium, or at least that the big daddy won’t decide that they’re the problem (so they won’t have to go to the concentration camp). It’s understandable that when people are freaked out they start calling for a ‘vanguard elite’ to force us all to change.

My book is promoting a freedom-loving environmentalism in opposition to eco-authoritarians. There are only a few public figures promoting eco-authoritarianism, but there’s a lot of people around them who agree publicly, who witness their colleagues putting forward ‘eco-Stalinist’ ideas, but don’t challenge them.

I think this is the most important subject that you cover in your book. Authoritarianism has always killed movements that could have done a lot of good. For example, in one of your latest blog posts, you talk about the mass graves of anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. I’d add to that – between the February and October Revolutions in Russia in 1917, workers took over the factories and peasants took over the fields. But it was all taken off them by the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution put them in complete control from the centre. If that hadn’t happened, and the workers and peasants had been left alone, the 20^th century could have turned out so differently. We don’t want that sort of thing to happen again.

Yes. I’m glad you picked up on that in the book. I’m a left-libertarian, but in contemporary media, libertarian is automatically assumed to mean right-wing. But left-libertarianism is about believing in human nature – that we should all treat each other as sovereign beings, and that we should work together to decide how much of our power we give up to authority. The starting point is that we help each other to be free, and that any curbs on our freedoms need to be accountable to us. It’s the opposite of a misanthropic view of human nature – the opposite of the idea that we’re naughty kids who need a strict daddy to sort us out for our own good. This has always been the biggest part of environmentalism, philosophically. ‘Small is Beautiful’ for example (it’s the 50^th anniversary this year). It’s all about localisation, local control, bringing people closer to each other, and to nature, so that we’re more attentive to the impacts that we’re having on each other and on nature. It’s difficult for people to care about what’s happening to people and nature in China to make their T-shirts. It’s much easier to care about what’s happening right next to us.

Localisation can be done with global solidarity. People like Michel Bauwens talk about ‘cosmo-localism’, which isn’t about ‘my place is better than your place’, it’s that all places are better if they’re governing themselves.

‘Libertarian’ only became associated with the right after the Second World War. It used to be associated with left-anarchism, and was really just about decentralising power.

Yes. And there are lots of environmentalists who don’t like to see arguments between those who care about the environment, so they don’t want to argue about this issue. But if we don’t, left-libertarian, decentralising, democratic ideas and initiatives will continue to be the poor cousins to ‘eco-modernists’ with their modular nuclear power, direct air capture and all their other scams and schemes to get lots of taxpayers’ money from governments. So for all those XR and other rebels out there who are not being explicit about their politics, then you’ll end up being useful idiots for the venture capitalists. All we can point at from XR activity over the last 5 years is a whole lot of government funding for useless venture capitalist projects, and calling it a ‘climate response’.

Yes, that’s the big split now, isn’t it – centralisers v decentralisers, not left v right (it’s not even clear what those terms mean any more).

Well, the old left was about first recognising the undemocratic power of capital, and that’s really important. We have global monopolies in big tech, which manipulate the public sphere world-wide. An overt scepticism of and challenge to corporate power in a coherent way is the tradition of the left, and organising among working people, small business owners, co-op members and commoners, against the abuses of corporations and their mates in government. Those are good traditions, and we need to resuscitate them.

It’s interesting that some on the right are now also rebelling against corporate power, but they tend to do it on the issues that they’re currently interested in, rather than a broader critique.

I guess a lot on the left believe that the state is some sort of counterbalance to corporate power…

… rather than an agent and an administrator for them. Yes, you’re right, and they can be quite aggressive about it. They see themselves as socialist and my position as not socialist enough. But I don’t think that public funds being given to multinational corporations for ecologically-dubious technology schemes has anything to do with socialism.

Any more authoritarianism right now, to try to protect the biosphere, gets us trapped in some sort of oxymoronic merry-go-round, where the system is used to the benefit of corporations whose agenda is responsible for the damage in the first place.

The other thing is that socialism is supposed to be internationalist, so that indigenous people who live in the forests, who have the lithium and rare earth metals for ecomodernist, Tesla-driving Westerners under their feet have rights too. But with this ecomodernist story of net zero in Britain, and the belief that we can all switch to driving Teslas, it’s a nonsense, and there’s going to be huge damage to the most pristine environments in the world in order to maintain that story.

There’s no way of looking at this fairly without concluding that we need to reduce consumption levels in the West, and that needs to be done in a fair way, which needs redistribution.

I thought your chapter on framing and narrative was fascinating – especially looking at Guardian headlines on environmental news. Very reformist and anti-radical, for example that we can ‘make deals’ and somewhow fix this system rather than having to replace it. Putting lots of emphasis on environmental professionals and states to solve our problems.

And the Guardian gives the most column inches to environmental problems in the UK and possible world-wide, and it’s part of an ideological defence of global capitalism.

A lot of readers think it’s still owned by the Scott Trust, but it’s not. It’s owned by a capitalist business that deliberately chose the name Scott Trust Ltd, to make people believe that. If you put your faith in professionals and states to solve our problems, you have to ignore the fact that those professionals and statists have completely failed. If you don’t ignore that, you might lose hope that capitalism and our high-consumption lifestyles in the West can be saved.

I’m very aware of the argument that the state has power – over the military, over monetary systems etc. – and so to ignore the state in your political project is naive. In the book I choose to frame the project that we’re involved in as an attempt to reclaim our power from imperial modernity – the system of economics, politics and culture that coerce and manipulate us to help elites accumulate more power. We can reclaim power in all sorts of ways. We can start doing things for ourselves – music for example – rather than consuming content alone via our apps. I’m trying to help people do things for themselves in ways that add up to more than those individual actions. But it’s not a revolutionary discourse, because for me, as you mentioned, revolutions tend to be replacing a bunch of characters who love controlling other people with another bunch of characters who love controlling other people.

For real change to occur, we need to build from the bottom up, but keep thinking about how we can be more than the sum of our parts, and insulate ourselves from attack from centralised power. If we do believe that the current system is breaking down, then we just keep building from below and they will keep breaking apart from above.

We’ve supported co-ops and mutuals for years, but they need to go into debt, with the banking system, to bring infrastructure into the co-op world, and that debt burden has handicapped them to the point that they’re being bought out now by capitalists. The Co-op Bank and Co-op energy are now capitalist institutions, as are most building societies. So there’s only one serious response as far as I can see, and that’s the commons movement, and especially the new commons ideas coming from people like Dil Green, Chris Cook, Hans-Florian Hoyer, Matthew Slater and others. They don’t require debt, and they can introduce a new money system that doesn’t allow wealth to be siphoned out of communities and concentrated. A group of us in Stroud are working with them to build a commons economy in Stroud and to document what we do so that it can be implemented in other towns, and linked together to form the basis of something new.

Dave, this is the first interview I’ve done since the book came out, and that’s deliberate, because not much of the book is about what to do – just one chapter. It’s about seeing this ‘great reclamation’ as something we can all start. But within that, a crucial part is reclaiming economic power and our means of exchange – not being reliant on banks. I’m still the same person as when you discovered my work in 2011, and I believe that reclaiming the economy is fundamental to everything else. If we’re not doing work on that, then any other work we do will come unstuck at some point. For me, what you’re doing needs to be known about and done everywhere. They’re doing great things in Kenya, and I’m now in Indonesia – we’ve started a permaculture farm school, helping locals to develop permaculture farming; and on the back of that, we’re building a community monetary project that will allow people to buy the produce, but for doing something else, not by using bank-issued money.

I’m interested in currency innovation if it’s done in the right way – community-owned, using these commons ideas, using free/open source software, so that we don’t end up becoming dependent on corporations. I don’t know how much time we have before things get really messy. It’s quite scary what’s happening in the oceans – the pace of climate change and what that might mean in terms of knock-on effects for agriculture, production of and international markets in grains etc. But we’ve got to keep trying to do the right things. And what you’re doing is one of the right things.

Thank you. I’m writing a book about the commons, and your position on collapse is probably the first plank – to explain the need for a new system.

That’s interesting. Michel Bauwens took some time during covid to read up on past civilisations and how they collapsed. There are theories that in times of breakdown, the commons flourished. It’s interesting – as you were saying, when Tsarist Russia was collapsing, co-operative ownership flourished.

People stepped up.

We do. It’s the stupidest lie that we need someone with an official designation from on high to tell us what to do. We all know from our professional lives that those who climbed to the top of the corporate-state ladder had something wrong with them. It’s usually down to some sort of trauma, but as soon as they lose the ability to be challenged and removed, then things get really risky.

I don’t think green authoritarians will defeat the commons. People don’t like authoritarianism, but people of all political persuasions like the commons. When it’s rolling, and providing benefits for people – especially working-class people – that will make it very hard to stop.

It’s so good you say that, because a large part of the localising stuff have been through things like Transition Towns, which haven’t really got anywhere near the working-class. But there’s a lot of community solidarity and collaboration within working-class communities that could be recognised, supported and built from. The way that you can work with local, small businesses and entrepreneurs and groups in working-class communities with commons tools – that’s the way to go. That really is building from below, rather than just working with the middle classes who have a little spare cash to dabble in ideas like the Totnes Pound etc.

Yes. I’m from a working-class town and family, and I know that a lot of the ‘concerned middle classes’ don’t understand the working-class. But the vast majority of the world is working-class, so if we can provide useful, affordable things for them, we don’t have to worry about building a broad-based movement – we just sit back and watch it spread.

Well, keep doing the good work. I look forward to seeing you one day in Stroud.

You too. You’d be very welcome. Great talking with you.

Highlights:

• It’s understandable (but a bad idea) that when people are freaked out they start calling for a ‘vanguard elite’ to force us all to change.
• Any curbs on our freedoms need to be accountable to us. It’s the opposite of a misanthropic view of human nature – the opposite of the idea that we’re naughty kids who need a strict daddy to sort us out for our own good.
• All we can point at from XR activity over the last 5 years is a whole lot of government funding for useless venture capitalist projects, and calling it a ‘climate response’.
• The way that you can work with local, small businesses and entrepreneurs and groups in working-class communities with commons tools – that’s the way to go. That really is building from below, rather than just working with the middle classes who have a little spare cash to dabble in ideas like the Totnes Pound etc.