Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: Good sense on global warming IntroductionGood sense, for Antonio Gramsci, was the "healthy nucleus of common sense". 1 This article tries to make sense of what Gramsci meant by good sense, and seeks to develop his understanding of good sense into resources we can use to stop runaway global warming in time.Although I conclude by briefly outlining the politics of good sense on global warming, the article is not primarily concerned with how we use good sense on global warming.Before using something, we must know what that something is.The something here is the potential we -as human beings, as most people, as working class people across the worldhave in our heads to solve the climate crisis.I shall argue in the first most general part of the article that good sense is a conception of necessity, an interest in truth, and a relational, emergent morality amongst those who do not rule our planet.More concretely, the second part of the article will find good sense on global warming in the shape of use value rationality and anti-capitalism, in climate justice and in changing livelihoods prompted by climate change already under way.This is not an article about what Antonio Gramsci said about global warming.I agree with John Bellamy Foster 2 who claims Gramsci did not connect his Marxism sufficiently to nature and physical realities.Some of the recent scholarship on the "ecological Gramsci" 3 is too anthropocentric, focused on human beings, and the way we "frame" nature.4 The "philosophy of praxis" we need for the age of global warming, by contrast, needs to be much more in tune with nature, and the natural sciences themselves; "(R)evising slightly Marx's principle of historical materialism, we can say human beings make their own history, not entirely under conditioning of their choosing but rather on the basis of naturalenvironmental and social conditions inherited from the past." 5It is not all in our heads.Gramsci's democratic understanding of popular consciousness remains very important, however, for anybody who wants to build a mass movement to stop 1
Author: Ytterstad, Andreas
Language: English
Topic: Political theory and Gramsci
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Climate action
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1773061216