Is there any life left in radical politics?

I mean this literally and figuratively. The ecological crisis is demanding an enormous political movement to change everything. And all serious political movements have been fuelled by claims about what it means to be alive. So what’s the claim of radical progressive politics today? 

Liberalism, the failed creed of the West, rested on a vision of humans as ultimately brutal and in need of corralling. Neoliberalism -today’s equally failing update- relies on corrupted Darwinian accounts of humans as unavoidably competitive individuals. While outright fascism depends on taking these dominance theories to their extreme, the Left has always countered with other cooperative visions. But, in the last century, the counterproposal has wilted.

Rousseau’s vision of us as naturally peaceful, funky forest dwellers was debunked by anthropologists, as was Marx’s image of humans as uniquely capable of creativity by biologists. Mostly though, the countless racist, sexist, homophobic and ableist atrocities -all based on pseudoscientific claims about ‘Nature’- very reasonably led radicals to turn away from living systems as a source of inspiration for political struggle.

But with the exit of Life from its politics, have we also lost the life? What I mean is, how often does radical political work - campaigning, direct action, mutual aid, union organising - connect with a deeper understanding of what it means to be alive? If not, why not? And, more importantly, what would our movement be like if it did?

Answers to these questions are emerging from the edges. While the ecological crisis is demanding an enormous political movement, it is also reconnecting radical politics with the big questions about what life even is. And it is the frontlines of the crisis where politics and living are most blurred. These are the places where more and more people are exploring how our bodies, our newfound knowledge of evolutionary history, and our understanding of ecosystems, can inform a view of our lives -indeed all life- as viscerally politically charged. What they are fermenting is a progressive, revolutionary politics rooted in the hard reality of the living world, and not too soon.

Three-way bacteria exchange of genes. From What is Life? by Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan.

The currents that inform these new visions can be traced back to the work of the rebel biologist Lynn Margulis who, since the 60s, re-wrote the story of evolution. Her most famous -and at the time disbelieved- theory was that the leap from simple reproductive bacteria (known as eukaryotes) to complex cellular life (made up of prokaryotes), a pivotal moment in the history of life, was the outcome, not of chance genetic mutation, but of an intricate, playful partnership. This idea, called ‘symbiogenesis’, and its core implication that evolution is animated just as much by collaboration as competition, is now virtually undisputed.

Margulis’s findings, along with her many collaborators, have ushered in a new era in Biology. After Darwin and a slew of 20th-century updates, we are now in an era of the ‘New New Synthesis’. Hundreds of other discoveries, summarised in the 2012 paper ‘A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals’, have revealed the living world not to be characterised by competition, domination and separate species, but as heaving with symbioses, horizontal gene transfers, epigenetics and holobionts. 

What Margulis found was that life didn’t luckily inhabit a planet with perfect conditions for it to survive, but has, gradually, over millennia, created the conditions it needs to thrive. When she teamed up with James Lovelock, who discovered that today’s atmospheric oxygen levels were created by bacteria millions of years ago, they developed a new, radical idea of life on earth. Instead of something mechanical, incidental and dumb, they revealed it to be something creative, improvisational and intelligent, a connected whole which, in general, tends to create the conditions it needs to thrive. They named this whole Gaia.

Earthset. From NASAs Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

What do we do with such knowledge? What does it mean about who we are, and how we should live? And how might it reignite a new politics of life? These are the questions asked by another group of rebel thinkers, working in the fertile space between science and the humanities. Donna Haraway, legendary feminist theorist of science, leads the inquiry. She explores the ways our entanglement implies an ethical responsibility to cultivate kinship across species. Anna Tsing, an anthropologist, builds on this attention to the entanglement, and, focusing on the example of the absurdly connected Matsutake mushroom, finds life to be radically tenacious, and capable of thriving, even in the epicentre of the industrial economy. These theorists in turn are inspiring renegade poets and mythmakers like Bayo Akomolafe and Sophie Strand, who are translating these ideas into advice on styles of activism and alternative ways of being in the world. 

The vision that connects them all is of us humans as fully enmeshed, contaminated and intoxicated by the world. Yet none of them fully commit to a clear, defined form of politics. These theorists offer disruptions, provocations and world-shifting insights. But they are reluctant to offer solid ground for practical action. For those of us craving certainty -and why wouldn’t we be in such times?- Haraway and Tsing and the wider ecological turn in the academic humanities could leave us wanting. As we’ll see, activists on the ground, perhaps by necessity, perhaps from experience, are less hesitant. But before we get there, there is some wisdom to the caution of academics that is worth exploring.

The last few hundred years of Western political thought have shown that connecting Biology and Politics isn’t a straightforward route to emancipation. The ecological movement has drawn people towards fascism just as much as it has liberation. This echoes in today’s conservative pundits like Jordan Peterson and Steven Pinker who continue to rely on distorted versions of evolutionary psychology to promote regressive ideologies. There’s a dream of Nature offering us pristine principles towards liberation, egalitarianism, freedom, beauty etc. but it’s not a given. 

Peter Staudenmaier’s written an extensive history of fascism’s connection with the ecology movement, and he offers some useful methods to militate against it. We should, he suggests, aim to distinguish between a ‘reactionary’ ecological politics, rooted in nostalgic visions of the past, and a ‘progressive’ one striving to create an entirely new society. This line has always been blurry, but the stories he shares, with characters like Baldur Springmann, a former Nazi bringing ideas of purity and natural order into the German Green Party, remind us that we can’t be naive about the promise of a nature-based politics. 

It is tempting to say that the whole idea that Nature can offer us any redemptive path is bound up in fantasies of it as a pristine, Edenic thing. It is tempting to throw up your hands and forget it. But, as is certainly true for the people facing ecological collapse now, our rapidly heating atmosphere is melting away the luxury of resignation. What we need is tools, and a militant attention, to help us notice when ‘Nature’ is being coopted to serve the maintenance of power and oppression. Because for many, the connections between politics and life have stopped being hypothetical. In the chaos of war, resource shortages and the construction of alternative ways of living together, a deep vision that unites us with our evolutionary history and our non-human kin, is a vital source of solidity and solidarity. For the rest of us, trying to find a way in our own ruins, these visions may help us carefully craft the movement we need.

A tree house in the Hambacher Forest protecting it from the mining company RWE.

Take la zad, a 4,000-acre territory in rural France, liberated in 2018 by thousands of activists from the hands of a state-sponsored airport development company, over the course of a 10-year occupation. Here, the struggle meant many things: it meant constructing autonomous institutions to grow food, bake bread and build homes; it meant farmers, teachers, anarchists and punks learning to live together; it meant resisting armoured tanks and 11,000 tear gas canisters as the full weight of the French state tried to eradicate them; and, most importantly for some, it all involved a radical shift in their understanding of their place in the living world.

My friends Isabelle Fremaux and Jay Jordan, inhabitants of the zone, describe this ecological consciousness-raising in a gorgeous book published in 2021. Its title, one of the central slogans of the zad and many other resistance movements around the world, gets straight to the heart of things: We are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself. It is a simple, piercing claim. It fuses political action, the halting of harm and the essence of life. It moves nature from a sterile, passive, subjugated thing, to an ongoing, active process, one which desires the continuation of itself and will fight to do so.

With the help of Andreas Weber, a biologist philosopher, Jay and Isa take this slogan and stretch it into a cosmology that braids politics into life. Mostly it’s Weber’s 2019 book Enlivenment: Towards a Poetics of the Anthropocene that does the heavy conceptual lifting. In it, Weber takes what we now know from the New New Synthesis in biology, as well as the explorations of the likes of Harraway and Tsing, and translates it into a set of principles to live and think by. 

He starts with the simple yet powerful observation that “the state of nature is centered on the art of being a fruitful part of an ecosystem,” that life, in other words, wants to live. Fertility -the conditions for more life- is the goal of any participant in the ecosystem. And from here, an ethics unfolds with these as its principles:

• Individual freedom can only occur in conditions of collective freedom.

• The deeper the connections in an ecosystem the more creative niches are enabled for its individual participants.

• And beauty is an outcome of improvised responses to the paradox of being an ‘individual-in-connection’.

The most glaringly political of these is the redefinition of ‘freedom’. Freedom might be the most important founding political concept of the west, and the dominant liberal understanding of it always maintains that there is a tradeoff between that of the individual and the collective. Weber’s redefinition of it here sits in line with an alternative radical understanding of it, from Spinoza to Carla Bergman and Nick Montgomery, that says instead, that instead of being in opposition, the individual and the collective constitute each other. Margulis’s Gaia nods in agreement: the flourishing of the whole is an emergent product of the flourishing of life at all levels of the system.

What would Staudenmaier and other critics of ecofascism make of this? Well, Weber certainly isn’t describing a static, fixed Natural Order. No, here, life is in constant negotiation and synchronisation of flourishing at these different levels. These principles are not rules to be lined up behind, but contradictions that animate the unfolding of things. Or, as he says, in his typically heady way, they “do not augur stale harmony”, rather they “only become operative through paradox, which does not promise salvation, but requires—and enables—continuous gestures of imagination.”

A ‘gesture of imagination’ is a fancy way of saying ‘art’. Because in any particular constellation of an ecosystem, these ethics and the thousands of possible ‘next steps’, will always demand a creative response. The ineffable force that connects freedom of the part and flourishing of the whole is creativity. This is, at any rate, exactly what the defenders of the zad have discovered. As Isa says, opening up the zad “as somewhere that enabled forms of life to connect and unfold: that is what is beautiful. That is the aim of an art of life, an art that lets life live more.” An openness to the imagination, creativity and beauty is one way to distinguish this politics of life from the reactionary longing for a stable, harmonious state of nature. Despite the utterly banal preachings of a lobster-inspired hierarchy, there is no pristine Nature to return to, but there are organising principles, arts of noticing, and traditions of creativity to respond with.

Map of la zad.

This idea of art joins the zad with another revolutionary movement, thousands of miles away. “Beauty” is, for the Kurdistan Freedom Movement, “a value created in the process of liberating life”. For the revolutionary Kurds, life, democracy and the struggle for freedom over patriarchy are inseparable, and so goes the chant “jin! jiyan! azadi!” (woman, life, freedom). Dilar Dirik’s ethnography masterfully traces the complex connections between the history of struggle, ancestral Kurdish identity and feminist theorising. 

As you go deeper into this vision of the world, one idea appears again and again: at the heart of politics is the struggle for a ‘free life’. This idea goes far beyond the crude ‘freedom to’ (spend, destroy, work etc.) that our dominant culture is so stuck in, rather its a ‘free life’ much more like Weber’s. But, crucially, compared to our ‘freedom’, this isn’t a mild preference or an abstract human ideal, this is the essence of what life is about. “The option of freedom exists at all times,” Dirik says, “but struggle is the driving force, the principle of life”.

At the Mexmur Refugee Camp, somewhere between Iraq and Syria, a community of displaced people -largely Kurds connected to the revolutionary movement- have self-organised into an autonomous, egalitarian sanctuary in the desert. Dirik meets Aryen there, and although she is one of many voices in the book, something she says knits together many of the threads we have hanging in the air. It’s worth repeating it at length:

“When you attribute meaning to the notion of animateness,” she says, “if you view yourself as part of a nature that is alive, you can feel your existence beyond materiality. Capitalism created itself by destroying ecologies and distorting the world’s balance. Capitalist modernity annihilates non-materiality. Its mentality is the opposite of love, patience, and labor. This is the mind of male domination. Nature is exploited and put in the service of capitalists to generate further profit. This colonial relationship is mirrored in how society abuses women. What kind of life philosophy”, she concludes “can we expect from a system that is so oblivious to beings that realize themselves?”

This last line rings out across the desert with many layered meanings. What would a world look like in which ‘beings realised themselves’? What would a life philosophy and politics rooted in realising these conditions mean? And what is it this living world needs from us?

Kurdish YPG Fighter Credits: Kurdishstruggle

These are grand questions. And you could see the zad and the revolutionary kurds as fringe examples. But can they offer insights to inform the simmering pot of rage, despair and impotence that is our lives in Tory Britain? Yes.

On the road during a mobilising campaign a few years ago, a small family, friends of friends - not especially political people- put me and my comrades up for a few nights. We had a good time, and on our last day, saying goodbye, the mum goes: “you weren’t what I expected at all. I thought activists were a miserable lot, just against everything, but you’ve all been great”.

No surprises there. We’d been talking to people about the state of society for days, and found the exact same mood: politics is a hopeless, boring, deadening game. Anyone who bothers with it has an axe to grind or a hidden agenda. The very reasonable instinct here is that if you really cared about enjoying your life, you would never dream of wasting it on such an ugly thing. 

It’s not just the radical left that has had the bigger meaning of struggle stripped from it. Politics generally is not normal or natural. The majority of us, who enjoy life too much to waste it, keep out. So only 2% of people are part of a political party in this country, and only 30% of us voted in the last local elections (themselves utterly boring statistics). And the powerful who conduct ‘Politics’ claim sole authority over figuring out how we should live together. They enclose all the messy, exhilarating questions about what we want to become. 

But every day, whether it’s volunteering our time to something just for fun, learning something new, or just listening carefully to the friend who’s come round for dinner, we poach our ethical lives back. While ‘Politics’ is dominated by a zombie class, we do politics all the time. We couldn’t help it if we tried: we are woven into the world, our bodies inconceivably contaminated. From the moment we are born until we die, we depend on others for everything. This is what the zad and the Kurds, and the countless indigenous struggles around the world, are realising. The way politics has come to feel unnatural -and our involvement with it as polluting- is another extension of the illusion of us as separate from the rest of the living world. The ecological view of life punctures this illusion. There is no keeping out of it. We can’t help but be political animals. 

What we can help -miraculously!- is how much we acknowledge the desires of our bodies, how much we accept the terms set by the political settlement, and how much we are willing to notice the way that our experience of aliveness is deeply political. The project of reclaiming politics and power in service of life might just be the same as the project of reclaiming our nature as bodily, desirous, political animals. There is, I think, beyond wordplay, a deeper connection between the lifeless world of politics, and the disconnection of politics from the world of life. Refusing this disconnection gives us something to orient towards, something to fight for, a solid vision of freedom and the unfolding of creative forces bigger than ourselves and our species. A miserable lot? How could we be?