The Global Ecological Crisis and Weaving New Power Relationships

Abstract

The expanding litany of scientific warnings coupled with the mounting lived experience of the imminent climate crisis cannot curb the ecological destructiveness of capitalism, nor move states to break with its logic to preserve the integrity of the earth. To confront these pathological sets of social relationships, this paper examines how power operates to produce us as subjects who then act to conform to this system and the deformed set of values it fosters.

Only through understanding the functioning of power can we effectively resist the operations of capitalism bringing about global ecological catastrophe and begin to recompose our social and ecological relations. The further challenge explored by this paper becomes how to connect the multiplicity of resistances into a global rhizomatic network of experiments in practices of disobedience and of striving to realize new worlds.

The current and accelerating scale with which the global capitalist system ravages ecosystems is staggering as it transgresses various ecological planetary boundaries, from massive species extinction and ocean acidification to climate change, radically threatening life on this planet. The window for even radical action is rapidly closing. Therefore, we need to understand the relations of power underpinning this system in order to develop modes of resistance that have the potential to avert planetary collapse.

Through adopting a local analysis of power that allows us to conceive of power as an acentered network of intersecting lines of relations, one can begin to recognize capitalism and the state not as entities, but as comprised of a set of social relationships and local operations of power. Such a perspective reveals how effective disobedience can be conceived not as a direct clash with constituted power but instead as the withdrawal of consent to the political order, as a direct negation of its legitimacy. This approach proceeds by deactivating these enslaving relationships and opening spaces to create political conditions to engage in ongoing experiments with developing new harmonious social and ecological relationships. The pressing task then becomes how to bring together and coordinate these new spaces of freedom to weave them into a global web of connections. This network of connections can serve to strategically codify and coordinate resistances and alternative experimental political practices that foster new subjectivities and social relationships offering hope of averting the looming planetary collapse.