Reply To: “Degrowth” and intercommunalism, sharing, and caring

[Karin Louise Hermes]

This is possibly a more metadiscussion about the contexts of the EDC and ecological solidarities, as well as how my (German) father read about the Saito book in the German magazine “Der Spiegel” and said it sounded like my PhD dissertation (which he hasn’t read) based on my anti-capitalist points for climate justice.

My main premise isn’t really going back to Marx and being into Degrowth, but engaging in Indigenous and decolonial methods and practices that interconnect in Intercommunalism or hyperlocal (global-local) solidarities. *However* since my PhD like Saito’s was at Humboldt Uni in Berlin, Germany, I do refer to reinterpreting Marx/Engels and Hegel in the climate justice context for German “Leftist” engagement, instead of appropriating culturally-specific human-environment concepts.

The documenta 15 art exhibit in Kassel, Germany, also demonstrated the global South solidarities in practice based on Indonesian “lumbung” Intercommunalism, where the “rice barn” lumbung was the idea to bringing in many art collectives that do political work on the ground and sharing ideas and collaborations beyond the Kassel site (spacetime) itself… and that massively caused a problem to German hegemonic thinking and the same political premises my PhD goes into very culturally-specific German problems to decolonial solidarity…

"lumbung as a collectively-governed architecture for the storage of food serves a community’s long-term well-being through communal resources and mutual care, and it is organized around a set of shared values, collective rituals, and organizational principles. ruangrupa translates and continues this tradition of sharing within our own practice."

"When ruangrupa initially proposed the idea of lumbung as a collectively governed pot of surplus resources, it was speculating artistically on how to build such a common structure over time. Under the current conditions, the concept of lumbung, and its values of solidarity and collectivity, has never been more vital and relevant. In moments when so many are experiencing the inequality and injustice of the current systems, lumbung can act as an effort (alongside so many others) to show that things can be done differently." - https://universes.art/en/documenta/2022/lumbung

A bit about my ideas (and I decided last week to perhaps work on a PhD book after all, but as methods/ethics handbook on rethinking cosmologies, polities, and justice, so I can just write more articles without explaining it all over every time):

– deliberately using the word “Growing” in the dissertation title against the Degrowth terminology: Growing Intercommunalist “pockets of resistance” with Aloha ‘Aina in Hawai’i

– actually critiquing Marx, because the main issue I see in those ideas of communism/socialism is having removed/disregarded the holism of ancestral land and as community, a factor why Zapatista organizing and Indigenous-led forms of thinking/doing “new” worlds/systems are more useful to engage with: You can’t remove spirit from land/environment/community and expect it to work!

– “spirit” in philosophy as “energy” in physics: So how do we contemplate a changing climate and energy crises in global systems, when spirit has been removed (and power isn’t questioned)?