Future Historians

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===== About Us =====

{{:green-future.jpg?200|Another World}}====== Is Another World REALLY Possible? ======

===== International Study Group and Collaborative Writing Project =====
 
Sponsored by **Marxist Education Project** and **Victor Serge Foundation**

Convener: **Richard Greeman**

=== Who We Are ===

Is Another World REALLY possible? To find out, we Future Historians are performing a thought experiment. We agree to pretend that we are living a century from now on a damaged, but peaceful, egalitarian, sustainable planet in the year 2117. The job of our seminar is to put together a history book for teenagers called //THEN AND NOW// on the occasion of the bi-centennial of the unlikely and unforeseen 1917 Russian Revolution. Our method, is to research and discuss century-old Source Materials about 21st century capitalism’s impending catastrophes and the forms of resistance to it. We weave these sources together to present an objective picture of the unsustainable THEN and the existing alternative movements. Next – under the heading of HOW? – we extrapolate from the evidence of resistance to reconstruct the different paths that led from the dying world of THEN to our recovering, solar-powered, sustainable world of NOW. 
 
In real life we are individuals, activists in various movements, with varied viewpoints, backgrounds and national origins. Our international group includes women and men, students and teachers, a subway track worker, a writer, an artist, a businessman, a scientist, a few academics and various old radicals spread across the globe from L.A. to Moscow. Unlike many Leftist groups, we don't argue or denounce each other as traitors or deviants, although we have many differing views. Why? Well, to begin with we’ve all been dead for at least 60 years! Plus, we have no organization to fight over. So looking backward from the perspective of 2117, we are able see the complimentarity of the different roads (for example ‘reform’ and ‘revolution’) that led to the Emergence of new societies from the shell of the old. Our picture of the post-capitalist future world is inclusive rather than exclusive, pluralist rather than sectarian.  

**Our process** : examine the historical evidence and collectively piece together a plausible picture of our possible better world and the roads that led to it. 

**Our goal**: create a popular utopian fiction in the tradition of Bellamy's //Looking Backward// (1888) and Morris' //News from Nowhere//, books whose popularity brought to life a new socialist movement at the end of the 19th Century. Weave together a fictional ecotopia with the potential to go viral and become a self-fulfilling prophecy.  

**Our rules** : no gods, no extra-terrestials, no sectarian squabbling.

Our ongoing Future Historians seminar has been meeting weekly since September 24, 2017. We gather in-person at our New York studio and via teleconference with participants across a dozen time zones – from L.A. California to Moscow, Russia - including participants in Chicago, D.C., Vermont, Paris and Rabat, Morocco. They can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPjQ6Ku50OfG1XP1j0OHEyQ/videos

Participants as of Nov 15, 2117 include:  **Anya Rebrii,Ukraine/NY**, activist and anthropology student; **Lola Girerd**, Paris, writer and social psychologist; **Brian Tokar**, Vermont, Institute of Social Ecology, activist,  author of Toward Climate Justice; **Jenny Greeman**, NY, Actor and educator; **Peter Hudis**, Chicago, Marxist-humanist philosopher and activist, author of //Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism// and //Franz Fanon: Philosopher of the Barricades//; Silvia Federici, veteran feminist, author of //Caliban and the Witch//; **Jason Hicks**, NYC transit worker, union activist, DSA member, philosopher; **Julia Guseva**, Moscow, translator of Victor Serge, anarcho-syndicalist activist, co-founder of Praxis Center; **Harry Halpin**, Paris, Internet revolutionary and activist, team member World Wide Web Consortium, author of //Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web//; **Alexei Gusev**, Moscow, Historian of Russian Oppositions, Chair of Praxis Center ;  **Maati Monjib**, Rabat, Morocco, historian of Africa and press freedom activist, currently facing 5 years in prison as an opponent of the Monarchy; **David Schwartzman**, DC biogeochemist, Green Party activist, author: “Solar Communism” and //Life, Temperature, and the Earth//; Samuel Day Fassbinder, author of Greening the Academy and scholar of Marx and utopianism;  **Fred Murphy**, ecosocialism group leader at the Marxist Education Project and DSA climate-justice activist; **Richard Gumbo**, writer, New York/New Orleans; **Barry Feldman**, Chicago; and **Dan Hort**, artistic producer and progressive entrepreneur.
**Richard Greeman** (Convener), veteran international socialist active in U.S., France, Russia, Latin America, North Africa; best known as translator and scholar of the Franco-Russian revolutionary writer Victor Serge (1890-1947) 

Join us in betting on a //possible// future (even if the odds are a hundred to one)!  In a world spinning madly towards perdition, what have you got to lose?

===Prospectus===

Today's world confronts the triple challenge of climate catastrophe, nuclear holocaust, and social disintegration. All three crises are engendered by capitalism, which automatically places profit and power over human welfare and planetary survival. With the proliferation of heat waves, droughts, floods, and melting glaciers, with increasing inequality and millions of desperate refugees, with endless wars, raging epidemics, authoritarian governments, nuclear threats and nuclear accidents, one wonders whether there is even one chance in a hundred that the Earth will still be habitable a century from now.

So, let us soberly ask: Is another world REALLY possible? 

Why not perform a thought experiment and see? Looking backward a century to the benighted year 2017 we attempt to explain how our great-grandparents got us from THEN (capitalism's death-spiral) to NOW (a livable, sustainable, global society).

Our research focuses on such questions as: "What were the potentially revolutionary elements available in the 'old world' of 2017 that enabled our sustainable 'new world' to emerge? How did these latent social, political, economic, historical, technological, intellectual, spiritual and human elements combine to overcome the capitalist world system? How did the survivors of this titanic global struggle organize themselves to reclaim and remediate the planet?"

As imaginary 2117 historians, we will deploy the same methodology that historians back in 2017 were using to explain the emergence of the unlikely, unforeseen, barely imaginable Soviet Revolution of October 1917 on its centennial. We thus remind ourselves that the two key elements that combined to make the emergence of the Soviet Republic possible were nearly invisible only a few months earlier: 1) a small, underground workers party led by doctrinaire intellectuals (the Bolsheviks), operating in a vast peasant empire; and 2) the all-but-forgotten memory of spontaneous networks of self-organized councils (soviets) of common workers during the mass strikes of 1905-06 (initially scorned by at least some of the Bolsheviks themselves).

Looking backward from 2117 at an equally unlikely 21st-century planetary transformation, we will focus our research exclusively on the positive, potentially revolutionary tendencies, however feeble or transitory, visible in 2017 which might have combined in emergent synergy to unleash the latent power of the billions against the billionaires. To this end we will quite consciously “cherry pick” promising examples (e.g., the 1997 Liverpool dockers boycott, the 2011 Arab Spring), draw out their potential, and combine them in order to construct a realistic, materially possible, narrative that explains how it came about that there are still historians in 2117!

By 2017 people had learned that "No is not enough." What they lacked was a positive vision of a possible better world and possible roads leading to it. The goal of our project is to construct such an ecotopian vision in the form of realistic narrative (no Gods, no extraterrestrials!) – a vision based on evidence culled from our collective research into the transformative potential of the objective conditions, technologies, and social movements of 2017, and how they might combine to unleash the human power to change the world.

Our goals are twofold:
 
•	Looking backward over a century, we will identify the potentially revolutionary elements — social, technological, political, economic, historical, intellectual, human and spiritual — that were already available in the “old world” of 2017. Basing our research on selected readings from 2017 and earlier, we will explain how these elements came together during the 21st century in a unique synergy to open the path to today’s sustainable, democratic, egalitarian, planetary societies hospitable to historians. 

•	 Based on these findings, we generate a credible popular historical narrative, aimed at the youth of 2117, recounting how their grand-and great-grandmothers (and fathers) were able to come together, coordinate their struggles globally, abolish the power of capital over their lives, mitigate impending climate catastrophe, and to create a new society out of the shell of the old.

For if there still remains "one chance in a hundred" to save the world from capitalist ecocide, we ought to be able to imagine it. And who knows? Maybe this vision of a possible better world will go viral and become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

All power to the imagination!

Richard Greeman, Convener

 
 
===Format=== 
This is a “hybrid” project, combining readings and on-line discussions of each week’s TOPIC with a live, weekly video-cast international meeting. 

The readings and on-line discussion take place in the Future Historians Dropbox. (Send email to AnotherWorldNYC@gmail.com for invitation and access instructions). We are now experimenting with ListServe to simplify this process.

The weekly seminar discussion takes place live in our Studio in NYC and, via video-conference hookup, at remote locations from Moscow to L.A. Participants prepare readings and deliver short reports on week’s topic, and we all discuss it. 
 
Collective research: In preparation for this weekly meeting, participants at home select and share (in the Dropbox or on the ListServe) texts relevant to the given topic. These papers are then analysed and discussed on line by all, focussing on the impending catastrophes of the early 21st century contrasted with the embryonic elements of a new society developing within the old : “Then” (2017) vs. “Now” (2117).


===PARTICIPATION (Details):===
You can participate and join us in a variety of ways, explained below. Our Future Historians international reasearch and collective writing project makes us of a variety of media platforms, this WIKI, a DropBox, a ListServe, and we are still experimenting (sometimes clumsily – please be indulgent). 

**THE WIKI** is open for all to read. In is a work in progress. Only THEN AND NOW (link please) is current. This  “page,” the draft of the proposed history book, is divided into TOPICS, listed on the right hand menu. Each of the TOPICS is in turn divided into three sections: THEN, NOW and HOW (They can be read in any order). 

These somewhat arbitrary categories permit us to organize the results of our research, our discussions, our visions of possible better worlds and our extrapolations of roads leading there and convenienly plug them in under the heading of twenty-odd topics. We are now filling these Topics categories week after week with the results of our research and discussion, the basic bricks that will form the book. Once they are gathered, we can return, develop, and synthesize them.

If you want to add to the WIKI, you need to become an active member of the seminar, but suggested changes you send us at anotherworld.nyc@gmail.com will be welcomed, discussed and perhaps incorporated.

**THE ONLINE SEMINAR**
You can VIEW the weekly Sunday discussions live on line from 11 am to 1 pm EST (or your corresponding local time) by GOING HERE -  FRED PLEASE FILL IN. You can also view them later, at your convenience, on YouTube. 
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPjQ6Ku50OfG1XP1j0OHEyQ/videos


To participate on line, you normally need an invitation to become a regular Member. Folks with a special interest in one or more Topics are also welcome to come on as Guests. Please write to anotherworld.nyc@gmail.com and introduce yourself.  

**MEMBERSHIP**
Normally entails a commitment to do a minimum amount of regular reading (of materials distributed by other Members). We try to keep the readings SHORT. Each should also contribute some research (gathering Source readings on the Topic), and writing (preparing materials to be posted on the WIKI). Normally, about 2/3 of the Members are active in any given week, depending on their other commitments and their interest in the topic. 

**THE DROP BOX**
We have been using a DropBox with dedicated folders under each TOPIC for posting and discussing written materials, normally to be read before each meeting. Teams have been formed around each upcoming TOPIC (e.g. “Internationalism”). For access to the Future Historians Drop Box, write to anotherworld.nyc@gmail.com and introduce yourself.  This process has been a bit sluggish and some find it intimidating.

**THE LIST-SERVE** (bulletin board???)
We are now experimenting with email discussions on a List-Serve. So far this has proved rather dynamic, as when the emails arrive people naturally respond to them and the discussion develops rapidly. These discussions will be continued in different THREADS which correpond to the TOPICS, so the the results can be synthesised and added to the growing narratives of THEN, NOW and HOW?
FRED: Please supply ListServe information when ready.

The Research part of our task is finding useful materials that can be adapted to our purpose, cut down to a reasonable length, and eventually incorporated as the brick in the edifice of our narrative. Particularly useful are reports of resistance, struggle, and self-organization that can be extroplated from THEN into HOW and get us to NOW. 

Up to now, when we find an interesting report or analysis on a particular topic in the form of a book or article (for example of the Food Crisis LINK), we shared the URL and a very short summary on the weekly Reading List. If it’s long, we also copy/paste essential excerpts for all to read or produce a digest that can be adapted to the narrative on the WIKI. Now with ListServe THREADS, perhaps the Teams can refine them for later use. We're a project under construction, still growing. 

Please join us.

[[then_and_now|Let's Begin]]
Future Historians

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