Deliberating Alternative Futures

In response to the inadequate corporate-state responses to our global challenges, we are witnessing an explosion of self-motivated communal, grassroots initiatives and social movements pushing for more meaningful systemic transitions and transformative agendas. Modern societies are characterised by their fundamental dependence on (1) Capital replacing labor as the ultimate source of value; (2) Carbon – fossil fuels or more generally speaking, extractivism; (3) Compulsive economic growth through relentless commodification of socio-ecological relations and a multi-century mass appropriation of the commons, sustained through the constant promotion of consumerist cultures across the world; (4) Coloniality, i.e. the ongoing stratifying power relations and epistemes necessary for maintaining the integrity of intersectional hierarchies; and finally (5) Corruptive politics, energized by the rise of monopoly-finance capital, corporate-state interest-driven advances in surveillance, datafication, bio- and neuro-technology, and warfare. We call the above 5Cs, the five intrinsic characterizers of today’s world civilization system (Hosseini, 2020).

The question of what kind of new civilizational forms, both at the local and global levels, should or would ultimately replace the currently failing ones signifies the urgency of promoting utopian visions based on profoundly different perceptions of civilization. Indeed, we need to ‘re-imagine civilization’ anew. To be originative, the new movements need to address the major elements of what constitutes a self-sustaining civilization.

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