There is a way through this. But we have to remember who actually cares for us, and who is responsible, who we can trust, and who is trying to profit off of false solutions.
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We are hurting. We are afraid. Some are finally realizing, the apocalypse is here, and it’s coming for us.
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There’s no excuse for ignoring the cause of this. It’s capitalism, a system born of slavery and colonialism, a system that causes ecocide wherever it goes, a system of unending growth on a finite planet.
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It’s government, the State, a machine for war-making, a purveyor of genocide, builder of borders, the vehicle without which colonialism would never exist, the false hope that betrays revolutions and turns socialism right back into capitalism.
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It’s rich people, CEOs, bankers, investors, those who hoard far more than they need in a world of misery and suffering, of scarcity that they impose.
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It’s the IPCC and the NGOs, the media, and the astroturf movements like XR that take the mainstream climate framework seriously, that pressure for more government regulations and more green energy investment, ignoring the gap between promises and reality, projections and results.
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It’s those who pretend to be on the side of life when they’re really on the payroll. It’s anyone who hides the fact that carbon emissions are still going up every year, and everything the State and capitalism do to sell solutions only makes it worse.
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But there is a way through this.
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Look around you. Know that it’s your friends and neighbors and total strangers who will save your life if a hurricane or wildfire rips through your neighborhood.
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It’s the cops and soldiers who will shoot at you if you try to feed your children with food from a supermarket, food that would only be sent to a landfill.
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It’s the NGOs, professional activists, politicians, and institutional researchers who are on the payroll, who will continue to sell false solutions even when their neighbors’ houses are on fire.
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Know who to trust. And then look deeper. Look farther. There are realistic responses to this apocalypse that are already being put into practice. There are methods and projects and struggles that are based in reality, that prioritize our survival. They need your support.
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And those who profit off of misery and lies? Not one ounce more of attention, of validation, of trust.
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Spread this: no one is safe as long as those who rule us continue to own the future.
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Spread this: there are paths towards futures we can survive.
To find those paths, we need to give up any remaining trust in the dominant institutions of this society, and build our trust back with the fighters, the healers, the connectors, the gardeners, the builders who truly believe in another world.
Class Autonomy supplemental: IT’S TIME. We won’t survive if we continue to look to selfish individualism to solve all the problems it creates. Evolve ideas instead of acting out on them. Extend democracy to the workplace, where it currently ends. Recognise the slavishness of approval-seeking through upward class mobility, and the impossibility of upward class mobility on a dead planet anyway. Recognise the sound business fundamentals of reducing capital costs in leasing slaves for the same reason as one leases the car pool, i.e. to save money on buying them outright. Ditto requiring involuntary subsidies to dividends in the form of raising children to working age for free, and paying for one’s own housing via mortgages (in the original French: chained to death). Recognise that debt constrains movement as much as do physical chains. Recognise servitude for what it is: the denial of control over the means of subsistence by class-based monopolies. Ask yourself: if power over someone’s subsistence is power over their will, what difference does it make if monopoly power is public or private? Abolish the despotism of the dull work drums, of economic necessity and debt-servicing — a severely unnatural way to live. Jubilee forever; keep your home or roll it into a housing co-op.
Recognise that the defense of the individual from political autocracy extents to defiance of the autocratic social and class hierarchies inherent to capitalist social relations of production. Rise above the reasons for needing organised resistance to economic autocracy in the first place in how we respond. Avoid becoming everything we claim to oppose. Avoid reproducing authoritarian coercive control logic in the will to reconstruct harm as beneficial to the victim’s best interests in servicing a higher cause, up to and inclusive of the cause of the individual against coercive autocracy. Recognise this logic in the violence of the mythology of altruistic outcomes from selfish means. Recognise this mythology and its purposes in the civilising mission narratives of European Colonialism historically. Reconcile with the impossibility of imposing consent and free contract on top of the fait accomplish of violent conquest.
Distinguish between criticism and attack, opposition and abuse. Reflect on our own need to control everything in lieu of being halfway in touch with ourselves and our surroundings. Harmonize means and ends. Live values. Model best-practise. Refuse the Big Lie of the gold dragons in 3-piece suits of altrustic outcomes from self-interested means. Disobey its benevolently paternalistic third-party intermediaries who try to reconstruct the harms of social and class hierarchy as beneficial to the victims. Act directly and collectively. Become the change we want to see by working together cooperatively. Find unity by rising above essentialisms. Transcend false binaries and find the Self in the Other. Grow compassion, empathy and understanding. Personal and collective growth, not economic growth. Make our class solidarity an irresistible force for the wellbeing of all, and our collective survival amidst encircling ecocide. We can and must do better than this, we owe it to ourselves, each other, the past and the future. It’s time to take a stand for class solidarity, we might need it for our collective survival.
Two cents.
