This World Is Still Possible, Maybe

By request, now up at the Polygraph website: Michael Hardt’s “Two Faces of Apocalypse: A Letter from Copenhagen” from Polygraph 22.

This conceptual conflict between limits and limitlessness is reflected in the seemingly incompatible slogans of the movements that met in Copenhagen. A favorite rallying cry of anticapitalist social movements in recent years has been “We want everything for everyone.” For those with an ecological consciousness of limits, of course, this sounds like an absurd, reckless notion that will propel us further down the route of mutual destruction. In contrast, a prominent placard at the public demonstrations in Copenhagen warned “There is no Planet B.” For anticapitalist activists this too closely echoes the neoliberal matra popularized 30 years ago by the Margaret Thatcher government: “There is no alternative.” Indeed the struggles against neoliberalism of the past decades have been defined by their belief in the possibility of radical, seemingly limitless alternatives. In short, the World Social Forum motto, “Another world is possible,” might translate in the context of the climate changes movements into something like, “This world is still possible, maybe.”