Manifestos of Note
1. Slow Science
— Bear with us, while we think.
Scientific American makes some good points also..
2. Reclaim the Commons Manifesto
“Humankind is suffering from an unprecedented campaign of privatization and commodification of the most basic elements of life: nature, culture, human work and knowledge itself. In countless arenas, businesses are claiming our shared inheritance - sciences, creative works, water, the atmosphere, health, education, genetic diversity, even living creatures — as private property. A compulsive quest for short-term financial gain is sacrificing the prosperity of all and the stability of the Earth itself.”
3. The Accelerationist Manifesto
“Accelerationists want to unleash latent productive forces. In this project, the material platform of neoliberalism does not need to be destroyed. It needs to be repurposed towards common ends.”
4. Critical Hedonisms
“Critical Hedonism(s) is a project geared toward producing a more equitable ethics concerning the distribution of pleasure and care. It investigates how we might generate an economy of desiring and solidarity that is not constructed and taxed by external agents — specifically by capital/commerce and by the state/hierarchical institutions.”
5. Convivialist Manifesto
“Humanity has never had so many material resources as well as scientific and technical expertise at its disposal. Taken as a whole, its wealth and power have grown to an extent unimaginable in previous centuries. There is no evidence that this has made us any happier, but there is little desire for a reversal of the trend, given the prevalent view that new opportunities for personal development and collective achievement continue to unravel every day.Yet, conversely, there are plenty of reasons to believe that this accumulation of power cannot continue endlessly, in its present technological logic, without becoming self-destructive and threatening to the moral and physical survival of humanity. The first threats that we are required to address are material, technical, ecological and economical. In a word: Entropical threats. We are, however, much less able to even begin to imagine answers to the second type of threats, that is moral and political threats. In a word: Anthropogenic threats.”
6. Declaration of interdependence
“Our home, planet Earth, is finite; all life shares its resources and the energy from the sun, and therefore has limits to growth. For the first time, we have touched those limits. When we compromise the air, the water, the soil and the variety of life, we steal from the endless future to serve the fleeting present.
All this that we know and believe must now become the foundation of the way we live. At this turning point in our relationship with Earth, we work for an evolution: from dominance to partnership; from fragmentation to connection; from insecurity, to interdependence.”
7. Embassy Network Shared Critiques
It is extremely challenging to agree on a set of shared, affirmative principles without being prescriptive, alienating, shutting down the diversity of perspectives represented in our numbers, or foreclosing certain modes of experimentation. For these reasons, we have decided instead to agree on a shared set of critiques of the status quo, the perpetuation of which we categorically reject. By sharing a common critique, and a general rejection of our society’s present trajectory, we hope to benefit from a shared basis for our projects, or experiments and our efforts in general.
1) Systemic inequities resulting in the poor distribution of resources, services, access, mobility, status, pleasure and care.
2) Zero-sum games — systems and patterns of production and distribution that require some to lose in order for others to win.
3) Concentration and enclosure for private benefit.
4) Economic growth as a unilateral metric of success.
5) Squandering the future, whether through short-sighted and risky economic investments, polluting/depleting production processes, or other unsustainable practices that shift the burden of the present onto future generations.
6) Hierarchies of social stature rooted in — and reinforcing — regimes of status, identity, position, attractiveness, etc.
7) Standardized regimes of desirability, aspirational goals, mono-cultural attitudes and aesthetics, and normative prescriptions designed to maintain hierarchies.
8. Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation
“It is through, and not despite, our alienated condition that we can free ourselves from the muck of immediacy. The construction of freedom involves not less but more alienation; alienation is the labour of freedom’s construction. Nothing should be accepted as fixed, permanent, or ‘given’ — neither material conditions nor social forms. XF mutates, navigates and probes every horizon.”
9. Manifesto of the Communist Party
“And here it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within her slavery, because it cannot help letting her sink into such a state that it has to feed her instead of being fed by her. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie; in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society. The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labor. Wage-labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of modern industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”
10. Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, 2008
Other interesting Manifestos, or manifestos of note:
Solar Punk press manifestos of note
Manifesto of the Committee to Abolish Outer Space
“It’s a truism that capitalism never solves its problems but only moves them around. Finally it’s running out of space. The conditions necessary not only for social but biological life are being eroded. It’s running out of minerals; it’s running out of value (the amount of debt on the planet now exceeds the total value of everything on Earth). And all this is accompanied by ghastly mocking nebulae and the idea that the greatest possible course of action for humanity is for us to go about exploring the galaxy, turning void into value, giving capital an infinite field in which to work its sinister magic.
We should be very afraid. In outer space there is no relation to nature, only antagonism. We think the world is being treated carelessly now; we haven’t seen anything yet. As Silvia Federici showed, the process of primitive accumulation took place not only across the ravaged terrain of the Americas but across the territory of the female body, using technologies of power acquired through colonial conquest. Any new capitalist feeding frenzy will bring with it not only immiseration and slavery but new techniques of discipline, unimaginable today but perhaps not unlike those claws that will drag mineral-rich asteroids into the waiting maws of the machines. Marx wrote that “capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” In the first phase of primitive accumulation it arose as a monster out of the stolen earth. What new tentacled horrors could arrive from the dead blackness of outer space?”
