Review of Reimagining Livelihoods, by Ethan Miller: Designing the Basis for Shared Survival, for Ourselves, with Others, and for Still Others Yet to Come

Abstract

Ethan Miller’s Reimagining Livelihoods powerfully draws from, extends, and ultimately redesigns concepts central to Marxian economics—in particular, diverse economies and theories developing the concept of livelihood as postcapitalist political imaginary while engaging in dialogue with Deleuze and Guattarri, Latour, Escobar, and Haraway, among many others. Miller’s project aims to unmake the major categories of thought—environment, economy, society—that inform the project of sustainable development. This review essay uses Miller’s livelihood framework to reread the author’s “involvement in an” engaged/activist research project, Cooling the Commons, which focuses on climate-readiness in the hot city of Sydney. Livelihood offers powerful insights into what it might mean to common the city, for ourselves, for and with others, including those yet to arrive. This essay also suggests that human subjectivity—desire, self-conception, enjoyment—remains a vitally important consideration in the pursuit of livelihood, including life on a burning-hot continent.

Key Words:

• Critical Theory
• Environment
• Ideology
• Leftist Politics
• Radical Social Theory

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the work of the Cooling the Commons research project team including researchers Abby Mellick-Lopes, Louise Crabtree, Katherine Gibson, Emma Power, Cameron Tonkinwise, and Helen Armstrong in dialogue with residents, planners, community and social housing providers in the Western Sydney region.

Notes

1 Literally, as I am writing this, 10 percent of the continent of Australia, where I am typing these words, is on fire.