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The future of the left in plantationscene viewed from the neo-plantation

Brazil is quickly turning back into a plantation. The open scars of Latin America carry on being wide open and infected. It has always been also a lab for other endeavors of power elsewhere - it will continue like this.

What is the way out? I've been taken by Pasolini last texts (at around 1974/5). In his last text, a discourse that was meant for a Radical Party convention, he distinguishes between communism and extremism. The latter is the goal of expanding the form of life of the white (male, heterossexual) borgeoisie to the subaltern classes because the privileged know better, live better, plan better, feel better and think better. As Pasolini says in his Unhappy Youngsters, the idea is that poverty (and deprivation of bougi goods) are the worse of all possible evils. Since his death, as he feared, the left became more and more extremist (cultural wars, political correctness in language) and with extremism the left discourse and gesture became tamed. Everyone was invited (or forced) to become law-abiding citizens with their claws polished (the nigger, the dyke, the faggot, the bitch, the witch, the weirdo, the beggar, the worker) and then they lost their bite. The left ceased to be a project of difference (or of antagonism).

What will happen to this Latin American continent after its (various shades of) pink wave? Left to the rest of the world own devices and to most of its white-and-rich adoring elites (and a lot of its conformist and media-hypnotized deprived population) it will continue as a plantation until the end of the species. Resistance can only happen outside the framework of extremism. Antagonism and difference will have to be asserted as such: no more claw-clipping. I've been exploring the chances of animism: the idea of creating networks beyond the species. Animism, as I understand and advocate, should be non-extremist: it should be about constant denaturalization. I take denaturalization is an anticolonial enterprise. It is about finding ways to stop seeing being as a resource. I defend (in my Linhas de Animismo Futuro forthcoming) that the alternative to taking things as resources is not to let them be what they (as what they are) are but rather to strengthen the ever-re-articulating co-existence ties between them. That means: more social interactions (or intra-actions) with what there is, more trust-building, more interruptions, more chances for less conditioned hospitality. How is my version of animism anti-extremist? Well, there are many social relations to be maintained with what there is. To make them like us or for us (the two social relations that colonialism favors) are not to be the ones defended or implemented by an animist, anti-extremist left.

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